In Memoriam
What's missing
is the eyeballs
in each of us, but it doesn't matter
because you've got the bucks, the bucks, the bucks.
You let
me touch them, fondle the green faces
lick at their numbers and it lets you be
my "Daddy!" "Daddy!" and though I fought
all alone
with molesters and crooks, I knew your money
would save me, your courage, your "I've had
considerable experience
as a soldier...
fighting to win millions for myself, it's true.
But I did win," and me praying for "our men out there"
just
made it okay to be an orphan whose blood was no one's,
whose curls were hung up on a wire machine and electrified,
while
you built and unbuilt intrigues called nations,
and did in the bad ones, always, always,
and always came at my perils,
the black Christs of childhood,
always came when my heart stood naked in the street
and they threw apples at it or twelve-day-old-dead-fish.
"Daddy!"
"Daddy," we all won that war,
when you sang me the money songs
Annie, Annie you sang
and I knew you drove a pure
gold car
and put diamonds in you coke
for the crunchy sound, the adorable sound
and the moon too was in your portfolio,
as
well as the ocean with its sleepy dead.
And I was always brave, wasn't I?
I never bled?
I never saw a man expose
himself.
No. No.
I never saw a drunkard in his blubber.
I never let lightning go in one car and out the other.
And
all the men out there were never to come.
Never, like a deluge, to swim over my breasts
and lay their lamps in my insides.
No.
No.
Just me and my "Daddy"
and his tempestuous bucks
rolling in them like corn flakes
and only the bad ones died.
But
I died yesterday,
"Daddy," I died,
swallowing the Nazi-Jap animal
and it won't get out
it keeps knocking at my
eyes,
my big orphan eyes,
kicking! Until eyeballs pop out
and even my dog puts up his four feet
and lets go
of
his military secret
with his big red tongue
flying up and down
like yours should have
as we board our velvet
train.
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for Sylvia Plath
O Sylvia, Sylvia,
with a dead box of stones and spoons,
with two children, two meteors
wandering loose in a 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 rasing 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 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!
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Since you ask, most days I cannot
remember.
I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage.
Then the most 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 and year,
to so delicately undo an old would,
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 a book carelessly open,
something unsaid, the phone off the
hook
and the love, whatever it was, an infection.
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a prayer
O Mary, fragile mother,
hear me, hear me now
although I do not know your words.
The black rosary with its silver Christ
lies unblessed
in my hand
for I am the unbeliever.
Each bead is round and hard between my fingers,
a small black angel.
O
Mary, permit me this grace,
this crossing over,
although I am ugly,
submerged in my own past
and my own madness.
Although there are chairs
I lie on the floor.
Only my hands are alive,
touching beads.
Word for word,
I stumble.
A beginner, I feel your mouth touch mine.
I count beads as waves,
hammering in upon me.
I am
ill at their numbers,
sick, sick in the summer heat
and the window above me
is my only listener, my awkward being.
She is a large taker, a soother.
The giver of breath
she murmurs,
exhaling her wide lung like an enormous
fish.
Closer and closer
comes the hour of my death
as I rearrange my face, grow back,
grow undeveloped
and straight-haired.
All this is death.
In the mind there is a thin alley called death
and I move through it as
through water.
My body is useless.
It lies, curled like a dog on the carpet.
It has given up.
There are
no words here except the half-learned,
the Hail Mary and the full of grace.
Now I have entered the year without words.
I note the queer entrance and the exact voltage.
Without words they exist.
Without words on my touch bread
and
be handed bread
and make no sound.
O Mary, tender physician,
come with powders and herbs
for I am in the
center.
It is very small and the air is gray
as in a steam house.
I am handed wine as a child is handed milk.
It is presented in a delicate glass
with a round bowl and a thin lip.
The wine itself is pitch-colored, musty
and secret.
The glass rises in its own toward my mouth
and I notice this and understand this
only because it has
happened.
I have this fear of coughing
but I do not speak,
a fear of rain, a fear of the horseman
who
comes riding into my mouth.
The glass tilts in on its own
and I amon fire.
I see two thin streaks burn down my
chin.
I see myself as one would see another.
I have been cut int two.
O Mary, open your eyelids.
I am
in the domain of silence,
the kingdom of the crazy and the sleeper.
There is blood here.
and I haven't eaten it.
O mother of the womb,
did I come for blood alone?
O little mother,
I am in my own mind.
I am locked in
the wrong house.
Selected Poems of Anne Sexton
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