Until tonight they were separate specialties, <br />different stories, the best of their own worst. <br />Riding my warm cabin home, I remember Betsy's <br />laughter; she laughed as you did, Rose, at the first <br />story. Someday, I promised her, I'll be someone <br />going somewhere and we plotted it in the humdrum <br />school for proper girls. The next April the plane <br />bucked me like a horse, my elevators turned <br />and fear blew down my throat, that last profane <br />gauge of a stomach coming up. And then returned <br />to land, as unlovely as any seasick sailor, <br />sincerely eighteen; my first story, my funny failure. <br />Maybe Rose, there is always another story, <br />better unsaid, grim or flat or predatory. <br />Half a mile down the lights of the in-between cities <br />turn up their eyes at me. And I remember Betsy's <br />story, the April night of the civilian air crash <br />and her sudden name misspelled in the evening paper, <br />the interior of shock and the paper gone in the trash <br />ten years now. She used the return ticket I gave her. <br />This was the rude kill of her; two planes cracking <br />in mid-air over Washington, like blind birds. <br />And the picking up afterwards, the morticians tracking <br />bodies in the Potomac and piecing them like boards <br />to make a leg or a face. There is only her miniature <br />photograph left, too long now for fear to remember. <br />Special tonight because I made her into a story <br />that I grew to know and savor. <br />A reason to worry, <br />Rose, when you fix an old death like that, <br />and outliving the impact, to find you've pretended. <br />We bank over Boston. I am safe. I put on my hat. <br />I am almost someone going home. The story has ended.<br /><br />Anne Sexton<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-story-for-rose-on-the-midnight-flight-to-bosto/
