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Watch out for power,
for its avalanche can bury you,
snow, snow, snow, smothering your mountain.
Watch out for hate,
it can open its mouth and you'll fling yourself out
to eat off your leg, an instant leper.
Watch out for friends,
because when you betray them,
as you will,
they will bury their heads in the toilet
and flush themselves away.
Watch out for intellect,
because it knows so much it knows nothing
and leaves you hanging upside down,
mouthing knowledge as your heart
falls out of your mouth.
Watch out for games, the actor's part,
the speech planned, known, given,
for they will give you away
and you will stand like a naked little boy,
pissing on your own child-bed.
Watch out for love
(unless it is true,
and every part of you says yes including the toes),
it will wrap you up like a mummy,
and your scream won't be heard
and none of your running will end.
Love? Be it man. Be it woman.
It must be a wave you want to glide in on,
give your body to it, give your laugh to it,
give, when the gravelly sand takes you,
your tears to the land. To love another is something
like prayer and can't be planned, you just fall
into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.
Special person,
if I were you I'd pay no attention
to admonitions from me,
made somewhat out of your words
and somewhat out of mine.
A collaboration.
I do not believe a word I have said,
except some, except I think of you like a young tree
with pasted-on leaves and know you'll root
and the real green thing will come.
Let go. Let go.
Oh special person,
possible leaves,
this typewriter likes you on the way to them,
but wants to break crystal glasses
in celebration,
for you,
when the dark crust is thrown off
and you float all around
like a happened balloon.
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Comments
The first time I ever read this poem I was a freshman in high school. Reading it at 14 years old, "Admonitions to a Special Person" spoke to my anxiety about making my way through an adult world and my hope that I was (as the writer calls each of us) "a special person". I hoped to triumph in the end and in spite of being annhilated by life’s cruelty, as Sexton describes, "float all around like a happened balloon."
The first stanzas are warnings about what to watch out for in life, what to expect, as though the poet believes she can protect her reader from experiencing the same crushing lessons that she has had to learn.
But by the end of the poem Sexton admits she can't protect her reader by her own experience: "If I were you I would not listen to admonitions from me". In this statment she implies that only one's own life can be one's true teacher.
The poem would be as terrifying to me today as it was 23 years ago, were it not for the ending, which holds the promise of redemption. With two simple words of advice, "Let go. Let go.” Sexton encourages her reader to surrender and perhaps even to have faith. At fourteen I would not have thought Sexton meant "faith" but today I wonder.
One of the most striking and meaningful stanzas to me is the one about falling in love. The image of love as either a deadly mistake ("unless it is true") or something holy akin to a “prayer”. Somehow, even at 14, I recognized the truth of the power of one’s choice in who to love and one’s responsability to listen to oneself and how one responds to its beckoning. The poem still speaks deeply to my anxieties and my hopes about love and life and offers no advice, except perhaps to listen to oneself. Can one know oneself and surrender to one’s own inner wisdom? Is that ability to do so why the writer would claim us to be, each of us, "a special person"?
amy from United States