poems of anne sexton

7/27/2019 Poems of Anne Sexton

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POEMS OF ANNE SEXTON

Consorting with Angels

I was tired of being a woman,tired of the spoons and the post,tired of my mouth and my breasts,tired of the cosmetics and the silks.There were still men who sat at my table,circled around the bowl I offered up.The bowl was filled with purple grapesand the flies hovered in for the scentand even my father came with his white bone.But I was tired of the gender things.

Last night I had a dreamand I said to it...'You are the answer.You will outlive my husband and my father.'In that dream there was a city made of chainswhere Joan was put to death in man's clothesand the nature of the angels went unexplained,no two made in the same species,one with a nose, one with an ear in its hand,one chewing a star and recording its orbit,each one like a poem obeying itself,performing God's functions,a people apart.

'You are the answer, 'I said, and entered,lying down on the gates of the city.Then the chains were fastened around meand I lost my common gender and my final aspect.Adam was on the left of meand Eve was on the right of me,

both thoroughly inconsistent with the world of reason.We wove our arms togetherand rode under the sun.I was not a woman anymore,not one thing or the other.

O daughters of Jerusalem,the king has brought me into his chamber.I am black and I am beautiful.I've been opened and undressed.I have no arms or legs.

I'm all one skin like a fish.


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I'm no more a womanthan Christ was a man.


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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, survivorwhere your flames still bite my thighand my ribs crack where your wheels wind.A woman like that is not ashamed to die.I have been her kind.


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All My Pretty Ones

Father, this years jinx rides us apartwhere you followed our mother to her cold slumber;a second shock boiling its stone to your heart,

leaving me here to shuffle and disencumberyou from the residence you could not afford:a gold key, your half of a woolen mill,twenty suits from Dunnes, 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 boywaits in a ruffled dress for someone to come ...

for this soldier who holds his bugle like a toyor for this velvet lady who cannot smile.Is this your fathers father, this commodorein a mailman suit? My father, time meanwhilehas made it unimportant who you are looking for.Ill 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 beganthe year I was born; as crackling now and wrinklyas tobacco leaves: clippings where Hoover outranthe Democrats, wiggling his dry finger at meand Prohibition; news where the Hindenburgwentdown and recent years where you went flushon war. This year, solvent but sick, you meantto marry that pretty widow in a one-month rush.But before you had that second chance, I criedon 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 winners 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;and here, standing like a duke among groups of men.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 keptfor three years, telling all she does not say

of your alcoholic tendency. You overslept,she writes. My God, father, each Christmas Day


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with your blood, will I drink down your glassof wine? The diary of your hurly-burly yearsgoes 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.


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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 askwhy 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 dont always die,but dazzled, they cant forget a drug so sweetthat even children would look on and smile.

To thrust all that life under your tongue!that, all by itself, becomes a passion.Deaths a sad bone; bruised, youd 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 hookand the love whatever it was, an infection.


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Sylvia's Death

for Sylvia Plath

O Sylvia, Sylvia,

with a dead box of stones and spoons,

with two children, two meteorswandering loose in a tiny playroom,

with your mouth into the sheet,into the roofbeam, into the dumb prayer,

(Sylvia, Sylviawhere did you goafter you wrote me

from Devonshireabout rasing potatoesand keeping bees?)

what did you stand by,just how did you lie down into?

Thief --how did you crawl into,

crawl down alone

into the death I wanted so badly and for so long,

the death we said we both outgrew,the one we wore on our skinny breasts,

the one we talked of so often each timewe downed three extra dry martinis in Boston,

the death that talked of analysts and cures,the death that talked like brides with plots,

the death we drank to,the motives and the quiet deed?

(In Bostonthe dyingride in cabs,yes death again,that ride homewith ourboy.)

O Sylvia, I remember the sleepy drummerwho beat on our eyes with an old story,


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how we wanted to let him comelike a sadist or a New York fairy

to do his job,a necessity, a window in a wall or a crib,

and since that time he waitedunder our heart, our cupboard,

and I see now that we store him upyear after year, old suicides

and I know at the news of your deatha terrible taste for it, like salt,

(And me,

me too.And now, Sylvia,you againwith death again,that ride homewith ourboy.)

And I say onlywith my arms stretched out into that stone place,

what is your deathbut an old belonging,

a mole that fell outof one of your poems?

(O friend,while the moon's bad,and the king's gone,and the queen's at her wit's endthe bar fly ought to sing!)

O tiny mother,you too!O funny duchess!O blonde thing!

February 17, 1963

SEXTON, Anne Sexton. The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton. Boston: Houghton

Mifflin, 1981).

poems of anne sexton

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