Anne Sexton : 21 poems

                 Young

A thousand doors ago

when I was a lonely kid

in a big house with four

garages and it was summer

as long as I could remember,

I lay on the lawn at night,

clover wrinkling over me,

the wise stars bedding over me,

my mother's window a funnel

of yellow heat running out,

my father's window, half shut,

an eye where sleepers pass,

and the boards of the house

were smooth and white as wax

and probably a million leaves

sailed on their strange stalks

as the crickets ticked together

and I, in my brand new body,

which was not a woman's yet,

told the stars my questions

and thought God could really see

the heat and the painted light,

elbows, knees, dreams, goodnight.

                Dreaming the Breasts

Mother,

strange goddess face

above my milk home,

that delicate asylum,

I ate you up.

All my need took

you down like a meal.

What you gave

I remember in a dream:

the freckled arms binding me,

the laugh somewhere over my woolly hat,

the blood fingers tying my shoe,

the breasts hanging like two bats

and then darting at me,

bending me down.

The breasts I knew at midnight

beat like the sea in me now.

Mother, I put bees in my mouth

to keep from eating

yet it did no good.

In the end they cut off your breasts

and milk poured from them

into the surgeon's hand

and he embraced them.

I took them from him

and planted them.

I have put a padlock

on you, Mother, dear dead human,

so that your great bells,

those dear white ponies,

can go galloping, galloping,

wherever you are.

   

             All my Pretty Ones

Father, this year's jinx rides us apart

where you followed our mother to her cold slumber;

a second shock boiling its stone to your heart,

leaving me here to shuffle and disencumber

you from the residence you could not afford:

a gold key, your half of a woolen mill,

twenty suits from Dunne's, an English Ford,

the love and legal verbiage of another will,

boxes of pictures of people I do not know.

I touch their cardboard faces. They must go.

But the eyes, as thick as wood in this album,

hold me. I stop here, where a small boy

waits in a ruffled dress for someone to come…

for this soldier who holds his bugle like a toy

or for this velvet lady who cannot smile.

Is this your father's father, this Commodore

in a mailman suit? My father, time meanwhile

has made it unimportant who you are looking for.

I'll never know what these faces are all about.

I lock them into their book and throw them out.

This is the yellow scrapbook that you began

the year I was born; as crackling now and wrinkly

as tobacco leaves: clippings where Hoover outran

the Democrats, wiggling his dry finger at me

and Prohibition; news where the Hindenburg went

down and recent years where you went flush

on war. This year, solvent but sick, you meant

to marry that pretty widow in a one-month rush.

But before you had that second chance, I cried

on your fat shoulder. Three days later you died.

These are the snapshots of marriage, stopped in places.

Side by side at the rail toward Nassau now;

here, with the winner's cup at the speedboat races,

here, in tails at the Cotillion, you take a bow,

here, by our kennel of dogs with their pink eyes,

running like show-bred pigs in their chain-link pen;

here, at the horseshow where my sister wins a prize;

Now I fold you down, my drunkard, my navigator,

my first lost keeper, to love or look at later.

I hold a five-year diary that my mother kept

for three years, telling all she does not say

of your alcoholic tendency. You overslept,

she writes. My God, father, each Christmas Day

with your blood, will I drink down your glass

of wine? The diary of your hurly-burly years

goes to my shelf to wait for my age to pass.

Only in this hoarded span will love persevere.

Whether you are pretty or not, I outlive you,

bend down my strange face to yours and forgive you.

Anne Sexton reads All My Pretty Ones

    The Nude Swim

On the southwest side of Capri

we found a little unknown grotto

where no people were and we

entered it completely

and let our bodies lose all

their loneliness.

All the fish in us

had escaped for a minute.

The real fish did not mind.

We did not disturb their personal life.

We calmly trailed over them

and under them, shedding

air bubbles, little white

balloons that drifted up

into the sun by the boat

where the Italian boatman slept

with his hat over his face.

Water so clear you could

read a book through it.

Water so buoyant you could

float on your elbow.

I lay on it as on a divan.

I lay on it just like

Matisse's Red Odalisque.

Water was my strange flower,

one must picture a woman

without a toga or a scarf

on a couch as deep as a tomb.

The walls of that grotto

were everycolor blue and

you said, "Look! Your eyes

are seacolor.  Look!  Your eyes

are skycolor."  And my eyes

shut down as if they were

suddenly ashamed.

          Water

We are fishermen in a flat scene.

All day long we are in love with water.

The fish are naked.

The fish are always awake.

They are the color of old spoons

and caramels.

The sun reaches down

but the floor is not in sight.

Only the rocks are white and green.

Who knows what goes on in the halls below?

It’s queer to meet the Ioon falling in

across the top of the yellow lake

like a checkered hunchback

dragging his big feet.

Only his head and neck can breathe.

He yodels.

He goes under yodeling

like the first mate

who sways all night in his hammock, calling

                 I have seen, I have seen.

               Water is worse than woman.      

        It calls  to a man to empty him.

        Under us

        twelve princesses dance all night ,

        exhausting their lovers, then giving them up.

        I have known water

        I have sung all night

        for the last cargo of boys

        I have sung all night

        for the mouths that float back later,

        one by one,

        holding a lady’s worn out shoe

         Noon Walk on the Asylum Lawn

The summer sun ray

shifts through a suspicious tree.

though I walk through the valley of the shadow

It sucks the air

and looks around for me.

The grass speaks.

I hear green chanting all day.

I will fear no evil, fear no evil

The blades extend

and reach my way.

The sky breaks.

It sags and breathes upon my face.

In the presence of mine enemies, mine enemies

The world is full of enemies.

There is no safe place.

                    Anna Who Was Mad

Anna who was mad,

I have a knife in my armpit.

When I stand on tiptoe I tap out messages.

Am I some sort of infection?

Did I make you go insane?

Did I make the sounds go sour?

Did I tell you to climb out the window?

Forgive. Forgive.

Say not I did.

Say not.

Say.

Speak Mary-words into our pillow.

Take me the gangling twelve-year-old

into your sunken lap.

Whisper like a buttercup.

Eat me. Eat me up like cream pudding.

Take me in.

Take me.

Take.

Give me a report on the condition of my soul.

Give me a complete statement of my actions.

Hand me a jack-in-the-pulpit and let me listen in.

Put me in the stirrups and bring a tour group through.

Number my sins on the grocery list and let me buy.

Did I make you go insane?

Did I turn up your earphone and let a siren drive through?

Did I open the door for the mustached psychiatrist

who dragged you out like a gold cart?

Did I make you go insane?

From the grave write me, Anna!

You are nothing but ashes but nevertheless

pick up the Parker Pen I gave you.

Write me.

Write.

         Love Song

I was

the girl of the chain letter,

the girl full of talk of coffins and keyholes,

the one of the telephone bills,

the wrinkled photo and the lost connections,

the one who kept saying–

Listen! Listen!

We must never! We must never!

and all those things…

the one

with her eyes half under her coat,

with her large gun-metal blue eyes,

with the thin vein at the bend of her neck

that hummed like a tuning fork,

with her shoulders as bare as a building,

with her thin foot and her thin toes,

with an old red hook in her mouth,

the mouth that kept bleeding

in the terrible fields of her soul…

the one

who kept dropping off to sleep,

as old as a stone she was,

each hand like a piece of cement,

for hours and hours

and then she’d wake,

after the small death,

and then she’d be as soft as,

as delicate as…

as soft and delicate as
an excess of light,
with nothing dangerous at all,
like a beggar who eats
or a mouse on a rooftop
with no trap doors,
with nothing more honest
than your hand in her hand–
with nobody, nobody but you!
and all those things.
nobody, nobody but you!
Oh! There is no translating
that ocean,
that music,
that theater,
that field of ponies.

     Song for a Lady

On the day of breasts and small hips
the window pocked with bad rain,
rain coming on like a minister,
we coupled, so sane and insane.
We lay like spoons while the sinister
rain dropped like flies on our lips
and our glad eyes and our small hips.

“The room is so cold with rain,” you said
and you, feminine you, with your flower
said novenas to my ankles and elbows.
You are a national product and power.
Oh my swan, my drudge, my dear wooly rose,
even a notary would notarize our bed
as you knead me and I rise like bread.

Song for a Lady by Anne Sexton - Read by Maria Popova - Animation and Music by Ohara Hale

        The Ballad Of The Lonely Masturbator

The end of the affair is always death.

She's my workshop. Slippery eye,

out of the tribe of myself my breath

finds you gone. I horrify

those who stand by. I am fed.

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

Finger to finger, now she's mine.

She's not too far. She's my encounter.

I beat her like a bell. I recline

in the bower where you used to mount her.

You borrowed me on the flowered spread.

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

Take for instance this night, my love,

that every single couple puts together

with a joint overturning, beneath, above,

the abundant two on sponge and feather,

kneeling and pushing, head to head.

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

I break out of my body this way,

an annoying miracle. Could I

put the dream market on display?

I am spread out. I crucify.

My little plum is what you said.

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

Then my black-eyed rival came.

The lady of water, rising on the beach,

a piano at her fingertips, shame

on her lips and a flute's speech.

And I was the knock-kneed broom instead.

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

She took you the way a women takes

a bargain dress off the rack

and I broke the way a stone breaks.

I give back your books and fishing tack.

Today's paper says that you are wed.

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

The boys and girls are one tonight.

They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies.

They take off shoes. They turn off the light.

The glimmering creatures are full of lies.

They are eating each other. They are overfed.

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

         When Man Enters Woman

When man,

enters woman,

like the surf biting the shore,

again and again,

and the woman opens her mouth with pleasure

and her teeth gleam

like the alphabet,

Logos appears milking a star,

and the man

inside of woman

ties a knot

so that they will

never again be separate

and the woman

climbs into a flower

and swallows its stem

and Logos appears

and unleashes their rivers.

This man,

this woman

with their double hunger,

have tried to reach through

the curtain of God

and briefly they have,

through God

in His perversity

unties the knot.

    

      Her Kind

I have gone out, a possessed witch,

haunting the black air, braver at night;

dreaming evil, I have done my hitch

over the plain houses, light by light:

lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.

A woman like that is not a woman, quite.

I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,

filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,

closets, silks, innumerable goods;

fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:

whining, rearranging the disaligned.

A woman like that is misunderstood.

I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,

waved my nude arms at villages going by,

learning the last bright routes, survivor

where your flames still bite my thigh

and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.

A woman like that is not ashamed to die.

I have been her kind.

Anne Sexton reads Her Kind

   The Double Image

1.

I am thirty this November.

You are still small, in your fourth year.

We stand watching the yellow leaves go queer,

flapping in the winter rain,

falling flat and washed. And I remember

mostly the three autumns you did not live here.

They said I’d never get you back again.

I tell you what you’ll never really know:

all the medical hypothesis

that explained my brain will never be as true as these

struck leaves letting go.

I, who chose two times

to kill myself, had said your nickname

the mewling months when you first came;

until a fever rattled

in your throat and I moved like a pantomime

above your head. Ugly angels spoke to me. The blame,

I heard them say, was mine. They tattled

like green witches in my head, letting doom

leak like a broken faucet;

as if doom had flooded my belly and filled your bassinet,

an old debt I must assume.

Death was simpler than I’d thought.

The day life made you well and whole

I let the witches take away my guilty soul.

I pretended I was dead

until the white men pumped the poison out,

putting me armless and washed through the rigamarole

of talking boxes and the electric bed.

I laughed to see the private iron in that hotel.

Today the yellow leaves

go queer. You ask me where they go. I say today believed

in itself, or else it fell.

Today, my small child, Joyce,

love your self’s self where it lives.

There is no special God to refer to; or if there is,

why did I let you grow

in another place. You did not know my voice

when I came back to call. All the superlatives

of tomorrow’s white tree and mistletoe

will not help you know the holidays you had to miss.

The time I did not love

myself, I visited your shoveled walks; you held my glove.

There was new snow after this.

2.

They sent me letters with news

of you and I made moccasins that I would never use.

When I grew well enough to tolerate

myself, I lived with my mother. Too late,

too late, to live with your mother, the witches said.

But I didn’t leave. I had my portrait

done instead.

Part way back from Bedlam

I came to my mother’s house in Gloucester,

Massachusetts. And this is how I came

to catch at her; and this is how I lost her.

I cannot forgive your suicide, my mother said.

And she never could. She had my portrait

done instead.

I lived like an angry guest,

like a partly mended thing, an outgrown child.

I remember my mother did her best.

She took me to Boston and had my hair restyled.

Your smile is like your mother’s, the artist said.

I didn’t seem to care. I had my portrait

done instead.

There was a church where I grew up

with its white cupboards where they locked us up,

row by row, like puritans or shipmates

singing together. My father passed the plate.

Too late to be forgiven now, the witches said.

I wasn’t exactly forgiven. They had my portrait

done instead.

3.

All that summer sprinklers arched

over the seaside grass.

We talked of drought

while the salt-parched

field grew sweet again. To help time pass

I tried to mow the lawn

and in the morning I had my portrait done,

holding my smile in place, till it grew formal.

Once I mailed you a picture of a rabbit

and a postcard of Motif number one,

as if it were normal

to be a mother and be gone.

They hung my portrait in the chill

north light, matching

me to keep me well.

Only my mother grew ill.

She turned from me, as if death were catching,

as if death transferred,

as if my dying had eaten inside of her.

That August you were two, but I timed my days with doubt.

On the first of September she looked at me

and said I gave her cancer.

They carved her sweet hills out

and still I couldn’t answer. 

4.

That winter she came

part way back

from her sterile suite

of doctors, the seasick

cruise of the X-ray,

the cells’ arithmetic

gone wild. Surgery incomplete,

the fat arm, the prognosis poor, I heard

them say.

During the sea blizzards

she had her

own portrait painted.

A cave of mirror

placed on the south wall;

matching smile, matching contour.

And you resembled me; unacquainted

with my face, you wore it. But you were mine

after all.

I wintered in Boston,

childless bride,

nothing sweet to spare

with witches at my side.

I missed your babyhood,

tried a second suicide,

tried the sealed hotel a second year.

On April Fool you fooled me. We laughed and this

was good.

5.

I checked out for the last time

on the first of May;

graduate of the mental cases,

with my analyst’s okay,

my complete book of rhymes,

my typewriter and my suitcases.

All that summer I learned life

back into my own

seven rooms, visited the swan boats,

the market, answered the phone,

served cocktails as a wife

should, made love among my petticoats

and August tan. And you came each

weekend. But I lie.

You seldom came. I just pretended

you, small piglet, butterfly

girl with jelly bean cheeks,

disobedient three, my splendid

stranger. And I had to learn

why I would rather

die than love, how your innocence

would hurt and how I gather

guilt like a young intern

his symptoms, his certain evidence.

That October day we went

to Gloucester the red hills

reminded me of the dry red fur fox

coat I played in as a child; stock-still

like a bear or a tent,

like a great cave laughing or a red fur fox.

We drove past the hatchery,

the hut that sells bait,

past Pigeon Cove, past the Yacht Club, past Squall’s

Hill, to the house that waits

still, on the top of the sea,

and two portraits hung on the opposite walls.

6.

In north light, my smile is held in place,

the shadow marks my bone.

What could I have been dreaming as I sat there,

all of me waiting in the eyes, the zone

of the smile, the young face,

the foxes’ snare.

In south light, her smile is held in place,

her cheeks wilting like a dry

orchid; my mocking mirror, my overthrown

love, my first image. She eyes me from that face,

that stony head of death

I had outgrown.

The artist caught us at the turning;

we smiled in our canvas home

before we chose our foreknown separate ways.

The dry red fur fox coat was made for burning.

I rot on the wall, my own

Dorian Gray.

And this was the cave of the mirror,

that double woman who stares

at herself, as if she were petrified

in time — two ladies sitting in umber chairs.

You kissed your grandmother

and she cried.

7.

I could not get you back

except for weekends. You came

each time, clutching the picture of a rabbit

that I had sent you. For the last time I unpack

your things. We touch from habit.

The first visit you asked my name.

Now you stay for good. I will forget

how we bumped away from each other like marionettes

on strings. It wasn’t the same

as love, letting weekends contain

us. You scrape your knee. You learn my name,

wobbling up the sidewalk, calling and crying.

You call me mother and I remember my mother again,

somewhere in greater Boston, dying.

I remember we named you Joyce

so we could call you Joy.

You came like an awkward guest

that first time, all wrapped and moist

and strange at my heavy breast.

I needed you. I didn’t want a boy,

only a girl, a small milky mouse

of a girl, already loved, already loud in the house

of herself. We named you Joy.

I, who was never quite sure

about being a girl, needed another

life, another image to remind me.

And this was my worst guilt; you could not cure

nor soothe it. I made you to find me.

   For My Lover, Returning To His Wife

She is all there.

She was melted carefully down for you

and cast up from your childhood,

cast up from your one hundred favorite aggies.

She has always been there, my darling.

She is, in fact, exquisite.

Fireworks in the dull middle of February

and as real as a cast-iron pot.

Let's face it, I have been momentary.

A luxury. A bright red sloop in the harbor.

My hair rising like smoke from the car window.

Littleneck clams out of season.

She is more than that. She is your have to have,

has grown you your practical your tropical growth.

This is not an experiment. She is all harmony.

She sees to oars and oarlocks for the dinghy,

has placed wild flowers at the window at breakfast,

sat by the potter's wheel at midday,

set forth three children under the moon,

three cherubs drawn by Michelangelo,

done this with her legs spread out

in the terrible months in the chapel.

If you glance up, the children are there

like delicate balloons rising on the ceiling.

She has also carried each one down the hall

after supper, their heads privately bent,

two legs protesting, person to person,

her face flushed with a song and their little sleep.

I give you back your heart.

I give you permission —

for the fuse inside her, throbbing

angrily in the dirt, for the bitch in her

and the burying of her wound —

for the burying of her small red wound alive —

for the pale flickering flare under her ribs,

for the drunken sailor who waits in her left pulse,

for the mother's knee, for the stocking,

for the garter belt, for the call —

the curious call

when you will burrow in arms and breasts

and tug at the orange ribbon in her hair

and answer the call, the curious call.

She is so naked and singular

She is the sum of yourself and your dream.

Climb her like a monument, step after step.

She is solid.

As for me, I am a watercolor.

I wash off.

Anne Sexton reads  For My Lover, Returning to his Wife

   Wanting to Die

Since you ask, most days I cannot remember.

I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage.

Then the almost unnameable lust returns.

Even then I have nothing against life.

I know well the grass blades you mention,

the furniture you have placed under the sun.

But suicides have a special language.

Like carpenters they want to know which tools.

They never ask why build.

Twice I have so simply declared myself,

have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,

have taken on his craft, his magic.

In this way, heavy and thoughtful,

warmer than oil or water,

I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole.

I did not think of my body at needle point.

Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone.

Suicides have already betrayed the body.

Still-born, they don’t always die,

but dazzled, they can’t forget a drug so sweet

that even children would look on and smile.

To thrust all that life under your tongue!—

that, all by itself, becomes a passion.

Death’s a sad bone; bruised, you’d say,

and yet she waits for me, year after year,

to so delicately undo an old wound,

to empty my breath from its bad prison.

Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet,

raging at the fruit a pumped-up moon,

leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss,

leaving the page of the book carelessly open,

something unsaid, the phone off the hook

and the love whatever it was, an infection.

Anne Sexton reads Wanting to Die

    Menstruation at Forty

I was thinking of a son.

The womb is not a clock

nor a bell tolling,

but in the eleventh month of its life

I feel the November

of the body as well as of the calendar.

In two days it will be my birthday

and as always the earth is done with its harvest.

This time I hunt for death,

the night I lean toward,

the night I want.

Well then-

speak of it!

It was in the womb all along.

I was thinking of a son ...

You! The never acquired,

the never seeded or unfastened,

you of the genitals I feared,

the stalk and the puppy's breath.

Will I give you my eyes or his?

Will you be the David or the Susan?

(Those two names I picked and listened for.)

Can you be the man your fathers are-

the leg muscles from Michelangelo,

hands from Yugoslavia

somewhere the peasant, Slavic and determined,

somewhere the survivor bulging with life-

and could it still be possible,

all this with Susan's eyes?

All this without you-

two days gone in blood.

I myself will die without baptism,

a third daughter they didn't bother.

My death will come on my name day.

What's wrong with the name day?

It's only an angel of the sun.

Woman,

weaving a web over your own,

a thin and tangled poison.

Scorpio,

bad spider-

die!

My death from the wrists,

two name tags,

blood worn like a corsage

to bloom

one on the left and one on the right-

It's a warm room,

the place of the blood.

Leave the door open on its hinges!

Two days for your death

and two days until mine.

Love! That red disease-

year after year, David, you would make me wild!

David! Susan! David! David!

full and disheveled, hissing into the night,

never growing old,

waiting always for you on the porch ...

year after year,

my carrot, my cabbage,

I would have possessed you before all women,

calling your name,

calling you mine.

      The Black Art

A woman who writes feels too much,

those trances and portents!

As if cycles and children and islands

weren't enough; as if mourners and gossips

and vegetables were never enough.

She thinks she can warn the stars.

A writer is essentially a spy.

Dear love, I am that girl.

A man who writes knows too much,

such spells and fetiches!

As if erections and congresses and products

weren't enough; as if machines and galleons

and wars were never enough.

With used furniture he makes a tree.

A writer is essentially a crook.

Dear love, you are that man.

Never loving ourselves,

hating even our shoes and our hats,

we love each other, precious, precious.

Our hands are light blue and gentle.

Our eyes are full of terrible confessions.

But when we marry,

the children leave in disgust.

There is too much food and no one left over

to eat up all the weird abundance.

   

     Rowing

A story, a story!

(Let it go. Let it come.)

I was stamped out like a Plymouth fender

into this world.

First came the crib

with its glacial bars.

Then dolls

and the devotion to their plactic mouths.

Then there was school,

the little straight rows of chairs,

blotting my name over and over,

but undersea all the time,

a stranger whose elbows wouldn't work.

Then there was life

with its cruel houses

and people who seldom touched-

though touch is all-

but I grew,

like a pig in a trenchcoat I grew,

and then there were many strange apparitions,

the nagging rain, the sun turning into poison

and all of that, saws working through my heart,

but I grew, I grew,

and God was there like an island I had not rowed to,

still ignorant of Him, my arms, and my legs worked,

and I grew, I grew,

I wore rubies and bought tomatoes

and now, in my middle age,

about nineteen in the head I'd say,

I am rowing, I am rowing

though the oarlocks stick and are rusty

and the sea blinks and rolls

like a worried eyeball,

but I am rowing, I am rowing,

though the wind pushes me back

and I know that that island will not be perfect,

it will have the flaws of life,

the absurdities of the dinner table,

but there will be a door

and I will open it

and I will get rid of the rat inside me,

the gnawing pestilential rat.

God will take it with his two hands

and embrace it.

As the African says:

This is my tale which I have told,

if it be sweet, if it be not sweet,

take somewhere else and let some return to me.

This story ends with me still rowing.

  The Starry Night

That does not keep me from having a terrible need of - shall I say the word - religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars.

- Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his brother

The town does not exist

except where one black-haired tree slips

up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.

The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.

Oh starry night! This is how

I want to die.

It moves. They are all alive.

Even the moon bulges in its orange irons

to push children, like a god, from its eye.

The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars.

Oh starry starry night! This is how

I want to die:

into that rushing beast of the night,

sucked up by that great dragon, to split

from my life with no flag,

no belly,

no cry.

Anne Sexton reads The Starry Night

    45 Mercy Street

In my dream,

drilling into the marrow

of my entire bone,

my real dream,

I’m walking up and down Beacon Hill

searching for a street sign –

namely MERCY STREET.

Not there.

I try the Back Bay.

Not there.

Not there.

And yet I know the number.

45 Mercy Street.

I know the stained-glass window

of the foyer,

the three flights of the house

with its parquet floors.

I know the furniture and

mother, grandmother, great-grandmother,

the servants.

I know the cupboard of Spode

the boat of ice, solid silver,

where the butter sits in neat squares

like strange giant’s teeth

on the big mahogany table.

I know it well.

Not there.

Where did you go?

45 Mercy Street,

with great-grandmother

kneeling in her whale-bone corset

and praying gently but fiercely

to the wash basin,

at five A.M.

at noon

dozing in her wiggy rocker,

grandfather taking a nap in the pantry,

grandmother pushing the bell for the downstairs maid,

and Nana rocking Mother with an oversized flower

on her forehead to cover the curl

of when she was good and when she was…

And where she was begat

and in a generation

the third she will beget,

me,

with the stranger’s seed blooming

into the flower called Horrid.

I walk in a yellow dress

and a white pocketbook stuffed with cigarettes,

enough pills, my wallet, my keys,

and being twenty-eight, or is it forty-five?

I walk. I walk.

I hold matches at street signs

for it is dark,

as dark as the leathery dead

and I have lost my green Ford,

my house in the suburbs,

two little kids

sucked up like pollen by the bee in me

and a husband

who has wiped off his eyes

in order not to see my inside out

and I am walking and looking

and this is no dream

just my oily life

where the people are alibis

and the street is unfindable for an

entire lifetime.

Pull the shades down –

I don’t care!

Bolt the door, mercy,

erase the number,

rip down the street sign,

what can it matter,

what can it matter to this cheapskate

who wants to own the past

that went out on a dead ship

and left me only with paper?

Not there.

I open my pocketbook,

as women do,

and fish swim back and forth

between the dollars and the lipstick.

I pick them out,

one by one

and throw them at the street signs,

and shoot my pocketbook

into the Charles River.

Next I pull the dream off

and slam into the cement wall

of the clumsy calendar

I live in,

my life,

and its hauled up

notebooks.

     Yellow

When they turn the sun

on again I'll plant children

under it, I'll light up my soul

with a match and let it sing. I'll

take my bones and polish them, I'll

vacuum up my stale hair, I'll

pay all my neighbors' bad debts, I'll

write a poem called Yellow and put

my lips down to drink it up, I'll

feed myself spoonfuls of heat and

everyone will be home playing with

their wings and the planet will

shudder with all those smiles and

there will be no poison anywhere, no plague

in the sky and there will be a mother-broth

for all of the people and we will

never die, not one of us, we'll go on

won't we?

“All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children…. I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can’t build little white picket fences to keep the nightmares out.” Anne Sexton

9 suicide attempts, more than 20 admissions to mental institutions,  married at 19 with a businessman , mother of two daughters, a promiscuous woman, with both sexes,  a damaged life with one all consuming passion : poetry.  In the recent revelations  of sexual harassment her name also  popped up, in discussions on how do we relate to artists who have committed abuse.  There’s even an blog called famous pedophiles, where she is listed as one of the few women, alongside  Balthus, Anton Bruckner and Egon Schiele,  because of the  abuse she committed against her daughter, Linda Gray Sexton. Her daughter has written about it in her  book Searching for Mercy Street  My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton, ‘ a disturbing portrait of a mercurial, impossible and magnetic woman’. (NYT).  On October 4, 1974 Sexton put on her mother's old fur coat, removed all her rings, poured herself a glass of vodka, locked herself in her garage, and started the engine of her car, ending her life by carbon monoxide poisoning. 

A controversial woman, but what great poetry,  honest, direct, speaking from experience,  raw and feminine, with vivid imaginary, unexpected twists, never holding back. “Some people-- including other poets--were embarrassed by her poetry and sought to denigrate it, perhaps because it was so naked and painful that it exposed the hypocrisies they lived by (and even, at times, wrote by). But I would rather speak of Anne Sexton's bigness as a person than of her greatness as a poet. The poems are there--seven published books and two more (at least) to come. They will be understood in time--not as "women's poetry" or "confessional poetry"--but as myths that expand the human consciousness. Like all such myths, they are a big frightening. Some people would rather pretend they do not exist, or do not exist in the temple of art. But no matter: the poems go on saying themselves to us in the dark. They will not go away.” Erica Jong.   

Literary History has a  selective list of literary criticism for American confessional poet Anne Sexton, favoring signed articles by recognized scholars and articles published in peer-reviewed sources. 

Poetry Foundation  : short essay and more poetry  

More poetry here  : Hello Poetry 

Also of interest : “I Hold Back Nothing.” – Anne Sexton . By Sheila O’ Malley. The Sheila Variations , November 9, 2017.