Poems by Anne Sexton

                   

Doctors

They work with herbs

and penicillin

They work with gentleness

and the scalpel.

They dig out the cancer,

close an incision

and say a prayer

to the poverty of the skin.

They are not Gods

though they would like to be;

they are only a human

trying to fix up a human.

Many humans die.

They die like the tender,

palpitating berries

in November.

But all along the doctors remember:

First do no harm.

They would kiss if it would heal.

It would not heal.

If the doctors cure

then the sun sees it.

If the doctors kill

then the earth hides it.

The doctors should fear arrogance

more than cardiac arrest.

If they are too proud,

and some are,

then they leave home on horseback

but God returns them on foot.

Clothes

Put on a clean shirt

before you die, some Russian said

Nothing with drool, please,

no egg spots, no blood,

no sweat, no sperm.

You want me clean, God,

so I'll try to comply.

The hat I was married in,

will it do?

White, broad, fake flowers in a tiny array.

It's old-fashioned, as stylish as a bedbug,

but is suits to die in something nostalgic.

And I'll take

my painting shirt

washed over and over of course

spotted with every yellow kitchen I've painted.

God, you don't mind if I bring all my kitchens?

They hold the family laughter and the soup.

For a bra

(need we mention it?),

the padded black one that my lover demeaned

when I took it off.

He said, "Where'd it all go?"

And I'll take

the maternity skirt of my ninth month,

a window for the love-belly

that let each baby pop out like and apple,

the water breaking in the restaurant,

making a noisy house I'd like to die in.

For underpants I'll pick white cotton,

the briefs of my childhood,

for it was my mother's dictum

that nice girls wore only white cotton.

If my mother had lived to see it

she would have put a WANTED sign up in the post office

for the black, the red, the blue I've worn.

Still, it would be perfectly fine with me

to die like a nice girl

smelling of Clorox and Duz.

Being sixteen-in-the-pants

I would die full of questions.

Cinderella

You always read about it:

the plumber with the twelve children

who wins the Irish Sweepstakes.

From toilets to riches.

That story.

Or the nursemaid,

some luscious sweet from Denmark

who captures the oldest son's heart.

from diapers to Dior.

That story.

Or a milkman who serves the wealthy,

eggs, cream, butter, yogurt, milk,

the white truck like an ambulance

who goes into real estate

and makes a pile.

From homogenized to martinis at lunch.

Or the charwoman

who is on the bus when it cracks up

and collects enough from the insurance.

From mops to Bonwit Teller.

That story.

Once

the wife of a rich man was on her deathbed

and she said to her daughter Cinderella:

Be devout. Be good. Then I will smile

down from heaven in the seam of a cloud.

The man took another wife who had

two daughters, pretty enough

but with hearts like blackjacks.

Cinderella was their maid.

She slept on the sooty hearth each night

and walked around looking like Al Jolson.

Her father brought presents home from town,

jewels and gowns for the other women

but the twig of a tree for Cinderella.

She planted that twig on her mother's grave

and it grew to a tree where a white dove sat.

Whenever she wished for anything the dove

would dropp it like an egg upon the ground.

The bird is important, my dears, so heed him.

Next came the ball, as you all know.

It was a marriage market.

The prince was looking for a wife.

All but Cinderella were preparing

and gussying up for the event.

Cinderella begged to go too.

Her stepmother threw a dish of lentils

into the cinders and said: Pick them

up in an hour and you shall go.

The white dove brought all his friends;

all the warm wings of the fatherland came,

and picked up the lentils in a jiffy.

No, Cinderella, said the stepmother,

you have no clothes and cannot dance.

That's the way with stepmothers.

Cinderella went to the tree at the grave

and cried forth like a gospel singer:

Mama! Mama! My turtledove,

send me to the prince's ball!

The bird dropped down a golden dress

and delicate little slippers.

Rather a large package for a simple bird.

So she went. Which is no surprise.

Her stepmother and sisters didn't

recognize her without her cinder face

and the prince took her hand on the spot

and danced with no other the whole day.

As nightfall came she thought she'd better

get home. The prince walked her home

and she disappeared into the pigeon house

and although the prince took an axe and broke

it open she was gone. Back to her cinders.

These events repeated themselves for three days.

However on the third day the prince

covered the palace steps with cobbler's wax

and Cinderella's gold shoe stuck upon it.

Now he would find whom the shoe fit

and find his strange dancing girl for keeps.

He went to their house and the two sisters

were delighted because they had lovely feet.

The eldest went into a room to try the slipper on

but her big toe got in the way so she simply

sliced it off and put on the slipper.

The prince rode away with her until the white dove

told him to look at the blood pouring forth.

That is the way with amputations.

They just don't heal up like a wish.

The other sister cut off her heel

but the blood told as blood will.

The prince was getting tired.

He began to feel like a shoe salesman.

But he gave it one last try.

This time Cinderella fit into the shoe

like a love letter into its envelope.

At the wedding ceremony

the two sisters came to curry favor

and the white dove pecked their eyes out.

Two hollow spots were left

like soup spoons.

Cinderella and the prince

lived, they say, happily ever after,

like two dolls in a museum case

never bothered by diapers or dust,

never arguing over the timing of an egg,

never telling the same story twice,

never getting a middle-aged spread,

their darling smiles pasted on for eternity.

Regular Bobbsey Twins.

That story.

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.

For more poems by Anne Sexton, click here.

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Katya Podkovyroff