The poem
When I was a child there was an old woman in our neighborhood whom we called The Witch. All day she peered from her second story window from behind the wrinkled curtains and sometimes she would open the window and yell: Get out of my life! She had hair like kelp and a voice like a boulder.
I think of her sometimes now and wonder if I am becoming her. My shoes turn up like a jester's. Clumps of my hair, as I write this, curl up individually like toes. I am shoveling the children out, scoop after scoop. Only my books anoint me, and a few friends, those who reach into my veins. Maybe I am becoming a hermit, opening the door for only a few special animals? Maybe my skull is too crowded and it has no opening through which to feed it soup? Maybe I have plugged up my sockets to keep the gods in? Maybe, although my heart is a kitten of butter, I am blowing it up like a zeppelin. Yes. It is the witch's life, climbing the primordial climb, a dream within a dream, then sitting here holding a basket of fire.
I understand this poem as a woman withdrawing from the world around her.Scared of outsiders and only letting her family near her soul.Sort of like Emily Dickinson in her way of isolation from the world.How sad it is , it seems to me, that she was abused by her family in a sexual way from her writings in her poems... locking herself away was her protection... no it was her salvation !
Dame Dana