Anne Sexton

The missile to launch a missile was almost a secret. Two male Ph.D.’s were picked and primed to fill it and one hundred carefully counted insects, three almost new snakes, coiled in a cube, exactly fifty fish creatures in tanks, the necessary files, twenty bars of food, ten brief cures, special locks, fourteen white rats, fourteen black rats, a pouch of dirt, were all stuffed aboard before the thing blasted from the desert. And the missile that launched a missile launched out into a marvelous scientific balloon that rolled and bobbed about in the mists of Venus; suddenly sank like a sweet fat grape, oozing past gravity to snuggle down upon the triumphant shape of space. The two men signaled Earth, telling their Continent V ENUS IS G REEN . And parades assembled, the loud earth tellers spent all fifteen minutes on it, even shortened their weather forecast. But rival nations, angry and oily, fired up their best atom blast and the last Earth war was done. The place became crater on each side, sank down to its first skull, shedding forests, oceans, dried bones and neons, as it fell through time like a forgotten pitted stone. These two men walked hopefully out onto their hot empty planet with machines, rats, tanks, boxes, insects and the one odd set of three almost new snakes, to make the tests they were meant to do. But on the seventh month the cages grew small, too small to interview, too tight to bear. The rats were gray and heavy things where they ran against wire and the snakes built eggs on eggs and even the fish began to bump in water as they spawned on every side of each other’s swim. And the men grew listless; they opened the pouch of dirt, undid each locked bin and let every creature loose to live on Venus, or anyhow hide under rocks. Bees swarmed the air, letting a warm pollen slide from their wings and onto the grass. The fish flapped to a small pool and the rats untangled their hairs and humped over the vestibule of the cramped balloon. Trees sprang from lichen, the rock became a park, where, even at star-time, things brushed; even in the planet’s new dark crotch, that air snag where snakes coupled and rats rubbed in disrepair, it grew quick and noisy with a kind of wonder in the lonely air. Old and withered, two Ph.D.’s from Earth hobbled slowly back to their empty balloon, crying alone for sense, for the troubling lack of something they ought to do, while countless fish slapped and the waters grew, green came taller and the happy rats sped through integrated forests, barking like dogs at the top of the sky. But the two men, that last morning of death, before the first of light, watched the land of Venus, its sweetless shore, and thought, “This is the end. This is the last of a man like me.” Until they saw, over the mists of Venus, two fish creatures stop on spangled legs and crawl from the belly of the sea. And from the planet park they heard the new fruit drop.

Oh down at the tavern the children are singing around their round table and around me still. Did you hear what it said? I only said how there is a pewter urn pinned to the tavern wall, as old as old is able to be and be there still. I said, the poets are there I hear them singing and lying around their round table and around me still. Across the room is a wreath made of a corpse’s hair, framed in glass on the wall, as old as old is able to be and be remembered still. Did you hear what it said? I only said how I want to be there and I would sing my songs with the liars and my lies with all the singers. And I would, and I would but it’s my hair in the hair wreath, my cup pinned to the tavern wall, my dusty face they sing beneath. Poets are sitting in my kitchen. Why do these poets lie? Why do children get children and Did you hear what it said? I only said how I want to be there, Oh, down at the tavern where the prophets are singing around their round table until they are still.

1. After the sweet promise, the summer’s mild retreat from mother’s cancer, the winter months of her death, I come to this white office, its sterile sheet, its hard tablet, its stirrups, to hold my breath while I, who must, allow the glove its oily rape, to hear the almost mighty doctor over me equate my ills with hers and decide to operate. It grew in her as simply as a child would grow, as simply as she housed me once, fat and female. Always my most gentle house before that embryo of evil spread in her shelter and she grew frail. Frail, we say, remembering fear, that face we wear in the room of the special smells of dying, fear where the snoring mouth gapes and is not dear. There was snow everywhere. Each day I grueled through its sloppy peak, its blue-struck days, my boots slapping into the hospital halls, past the retinue of nurses at the desk, to murmur in cahoots with hers outside her door, to enter with the outside air stuck on my skin, to enter smelling her pride, her upkeep, and to lie as all who love have lied. No reason to be afraid, my almost mighty doctor reasons. I nod, thinking that woman’s dying must come in seasons, thinking that living is worth buying. I walk out, scuffing a raw leaf, kicking the clumps of dead straw that were this summer’s lawn. Automatically I get in my car, knowing the historic thief is loose in my house and must be set upon. 2. Clean of the body’s hair, I lie smooth from breast to leg. All that was special, all that was rare is common here. Fact: death too is in the egg. Fact: the body is dumb, the body is meat. And tomorrow the O.R. Only the summer was sweet. The rooms down the hall are calling all night long, while the night outside sucks at the trees. I hear limbs falling and see yellow eyes flick in the rain. Wide eyed and still whole I turn in my bin like a shorn lamb. A nurse’s flashlight blinds me to see who I am. The walls color in a wash of daylight until the room takes its objects into itself again. I smoke furtively and squash the butt and hide it with my watch and other effects. The halls bustle with legs. I smile at the nurse who smiles for the morning shift. Day is worse. Scheduled late, I cannot drink or eat, except for yellow pills and a jigger of water. I wait and think until she brings two mysterious needles: the skills she knows she knows, promising, soon you’ll be out. But nothing is sure. No one. I wait in doubt. I wait like a kennel of dogs jumping against their fence. At ten she returns, laughs and catalogues my resistance to drugs. On the stretcher, citizen and boss of my own body still, I glide down the halls and rise in the iron cage toward science and pitfalls. The great green people stand over me; I roll on the table under a terrible sun, following their command to curl, head touching knee if I am able. Next, I am hung up like a saddle and they begin. Pale as an angel I float out over my own skin. I soar in hostile air over the pure women in labor, over the crowning heads of babies being born. I plunge down the backstair calling mother at the dying door, to rush back to my own skin, tied where it was torn. Its nerves pull like wires snapping from the leg to the rib. Strangers, their faces rolling lilke hoops, require my arm. I am lifted into my aluminum crib. 3. Skull flat, here in my harness, thick with shock, I call mother to help myself, call toe to frog, that woolly bat, that tongue of dog; call God help and all the rest. The soul that swam the furious water sinks now in flies and the brain flops like a docked fish and the eyes are flat boat decks riding out the pain. My nurses, those starchy ghosts, hover over me for my lame hours and my lame days. The mechanics of the body pump for their tricks. I rest on their needles, am dosed and snoring amid the orange flowers and the eyes of visitors. I wear, like some senile woman, a scarlet candy package ribbon in my hair. Four days from home I lurk on my mechanical parapet with two pillows at my elbows, as soft as praying cushions. My knees work with the bed that runs on power. I grumble to forget the lie I ought to hear, but don't. God knows I thought I’d die—but here I am, recalling mother, the sound of her good morning, the odor of orange and jam. All’s well, they say. They say I’m better. I lounge in frills or, picturesque, I wear bunny pink slippers in the hall. I read a new book and shuffle past the desk to mail the author my first fan letter. Time now to pack this humpty-dumpty back the frightened way she came and run along, Anne, and run along now, my stomach laced like a football for the game.

My dear, it was a moment to clutch at for a moment so that you may believe in it and believing is the act of love, I think, even in the telling, wherever it went. In the false New England forest where the misplanted Norwegian trees refused to root, their thick synthetic roots barging out of the dirt to work on the air, we held hands and walked on our knees. Actually, there was no one there. For forty years this experimental woodland grew, shaft by shaft in perfect rows where its stub branches held and its spokes fell. It was a place of parallel trees, their lives filed out in exile where we walked too alien to know our sameness and how our sameness survives. Outside of us the village cars followed the white line we had carefully walked two nights before toward our single beds. We lay halfway up an ugly hill and if we fell it was here in the woods where the woods were caught in their dying and you held me well. And now I must dream the forest whole and your sweet hands, not once as frozen as those stopped trees, nor ruled, nor pale, nor leaving mine. Today, in my house, I see our house, its pillars a dim basement of men holding up their foreign ground for you and me. My dear, it was a time, butchered from time that we must tell of quickly before we lose the sound of our own mouths calling mine, mine, mine.

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 here 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.

So it has come to this – insomnia at 3:15 A.M., the clock tolling its engine like a frog following a sundial yet having an electric seizure at the quarter hour. The business of words keeps me awake. I am drinking cocoa, the warm brown mama. I would like a simple life yet all night I am laying poems away in a long box. It is my immortality box, my lay-away plan, my coffin. All night dark wings flopping in my heart. Each an ambition bird. The bird wants to be dropped from a high place like Tallahatchie Bridge. He wants to light a kitchen match and immolate himself. He wants to fly into the hand of Michelangelo and come out painted on a ceiling. He wants to pierce the hornet’s nest and come out with a long godhead. He wants to take bread and wine and bring forth a man happily floating in the Caribbean. He wants to be pressed out like a key so he can unlock the Magi. He wants to take leave among strangers passing out bits of his heart like hors d’oeuvres. He wants to die changing his clothes and bolt for the sun like a diamond. He wants, I want. Dear God, wouldn’t it be good enough just to drink cocoa? I must get a new bird and a new immortality box. There is folly enough inside this one.