Anne Sexton

CONSORTING WITH ANGELS

I was tired of being a woman,

tired of the spoons and the pots,

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 grapes

and the flies hovered in for the scent

and even my father came with his white bone.

But I was tired of the gender of things.

Last night I had a dream

and 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 chains

where Joan was put to death in man’s clothes

and 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 me

and I lost my common gender and my final aspect.

Adam was on the left of me

and Eve was on the right of me,

both thoroughly inconsistent with the world of reason.

We wove our arms together

and 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.

I’m no more a woman

than Christ was a man.

February 1963

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

into 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.

April 19, 1963

SYLVIA’S DEATH

for Sylvia Plath

O Sylvia, Sylvia,

with a dead box of stones and spoons,

with two children, two meteors

wandering loose in the tiny playroom,

with your mouth into the sheet,

into the roofbeam, into the dumb prayer,

(Sylvia, Sylvia,

where did you go

after you wrote me

from Devonshire

about raising potatoes

and 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 time

we 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 then the quiet deed?

(In Boston

the dying

ride in cabs,

yes death again,

that ride home

with our boy.)

O Sylvia, I remember the sleepy drummer

who beat on our eyes with an old story,

how we wanted to let him come

like 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 waited

under our heart, our cupboard,

and I see now that we store him up

year after year, old suicides

and I know at the news of your death,

a terrible taste for it, like salt.

(And me,

me too.

And now, Sylvia,

you again

with death again,

that ride home

with our boy.)

And I say only

with my arms stretched out into that stone place,

what is your death

but an old belonging,

a mole that fell out

of one of your poems?

(O friend,

while the moon’s bad,

and the king’s gone,

and the queen’s at her wit’s end

the bar fly ought to sing!)

O tiny mother,

you too!

O funny duchess!

O blonde thing!

February 17, 1963

SYLVIA’S DEATH

for Sylvia Plath

O Sylvia, Sylvia,

with a dead box of stones and spoons,

with two children, two meteors

wandering loose in the tiny playroom,

with your mouth into the sheet,

into the roofbeam, into the dumb prayer,

(Sylvia, Sylvia,

where did you go

after you wrote me

from Devonshire

about raising potatoes

and 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 time

we 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 then the quiet deed?

(In Boston

the dying

ride in cabs,

yes death again,

that ride home

with our boy.)

O Sylvia, I remember the sleepy drummer

who beat on our eyes with an old story,

how we wanted to let him come

like 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 waited

under our heart, our cupboard,

and I see now that we store him up

year after year, old suicides

and I know at the news of your death,

a terrible taste for it, like salt.

(And me,

me too.

And now, Sylvia,

you again

with death again,

that ride home

with our boy.)

And I say only

with my arms stretched out into that stone place,

what is your death

but an old belonging,

a mole that fell out

of one of your poems?

(O friend,

while the moon’s bad,

and the king’s gone,

and the queen’s at her wit’s end

the bar fly ought to sing!)

O tiny mother,

you too!

O funny duchess!

O blonde thing!

February 17, 1963

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.

February 3, 1964

SUICIDE NOTE

You speak to me of narcissism but I reply that it is a matter of my life … Artaud

At this time let me somehow bequeath all the leftovers to my daughters and their daughters … Anonymous

Better,

despite the worms talking to

the mare’s hoof in the field;

better,

despite the season of young girls

dropping their blood;

better somehow

to drop myself quickly

into an old room.

Better (someone said)

not to be born

and far better

not to be born twice

at thirteen

where the boardinghouse,

each year a bedroom,

caught fire.

Dear friend,

I will have to sink with hundreds of others

on a dumbwaiter into hell.

I will be a light thing.

I will enter death

like someone’s lost optical lens.

Life is half enlarged.

The fish and owls are fierce today.

Life tilts backward and forward.

Even the wasps cannot find my eyes.

Yes,

eyes that were immediate once.

Eyes that have been truly awake,

eyes that told the whole story—

poor dumb animals.

Eyes that were pierced,

little nail heads,

light blue gunshots.

And once with

a mouth like a cup,

clay colored or blood colored,

open like the breakwater

for the lost ocean

and open like the noose

for the first head.

Once upon a time

my hunger was for Jesus.

O my hunger! My hunger!

Before he grew old

he rode calmly into Jerusalem

in search of death.

This time

I certainly

do not ask for understanding

and yet I hope everyone else

will turn their heads when an unrehearsed fish jumps

on the surface of Echo Lake;

when moonlight,

its bass note turned up loud,

hurts some building in Boston,

when the truly beautiful lie together.

I think of this, surely,

and would think of it far longer

if I were not … if I were not

at that old fire.

I could admit

that I am only a coward

crying me me me

and not mention the little gnats, the moths,

forced by circumstance

to suck on the electric bulb.

But surely you know that everyone has a death,

his own death,

waiting for him.

So I will go now

without old age or disease,

wildly but accurately,

knowing my best route,

carried by that toy donkey I rode all these years,

never asking, “Where are we going?”

We were riding (if I’d only known)

to this.

Dear friend,

please do not think

that I visualize guitars playing

or my father arching his bone.

I do not even expect my mother’s mouth.

I know that I have died before—

once in November, once in June.

How strange to choose June again,

so concrete with its green breasts and bellies.

Of course guitars will not play!

The snakes will certainly not notice.

New York City will not mind.

At night the bats will beat on the trees,

knowing it all,

seeing what they sensed all day.

June 1965