Frenzy with Anne Sexton

We at the Monday Poet Society have returned to our female Confessional poets.

Anne Sexton, who battled with depression and mental illness. After giving birth to her child Joyce she fell into Post-partum depression. This is when she begun to write poetry.

Anne came to a Roman Catholic Priest in 1974 to be red her last rites. He, who was unwilling to read her her last rites, told her that "God is in your typewriter." This struck Anne Sexton who did not kill herself, but instead in 20 days wrote the collection "The Awful Rowing Towards God." Then in October she went on to take her life.

Frenzy
I am not lazy.
I am on the amphetamine of the soul.
I am, each day,
typing out the God
my typewriter believes in.
Very quick. Very intense,
like a wolf at a live heart.
Not lazy.
When a lazy man, they say,
looks toward heaven,
the angels close the windows.

Oh angels,
keep the windows open
so that I may reach in
and steal each object,
objects that tell me the sea is not dying,
objects that tell me the dirt has a life-wish,
that the Christ who walked for me,
walked on true ground
and that this frenzy,
like bees stinging the heart all morning,
will keep the angels
with their windows open,
wide as an English bathtub.


The Fish that Walked
by Anne Sexton

Up from oysters
and the confused weeds,
out from the tears of God,
the wounding tides,
he came.
He became a hunter of roots
and breathed like a man.
He ruffled through the grasses
and became known to the sky.
I stood close and watched it all.
Beg pardon, he said
but you have skin divers,
you have hooks and nets,
so why shouldn't I
enter your element for a moment?
Though it is curious here,
unusually awkward to walk.
It is without grace.
There is no rhythm
in this country of dirt.

And I said to him:
From some country
that I have misplaced
I can recall a few things...
but the light of the kitchen
gets in the way.
Yet there was a dance
when I kneaded the bread
there was a song my mother
used to sing...
And the salt of God's belly
where I floated in a cup of darkness.
I long for your country, fish.

The fish replied:
You must be a poet,
a lady of evil luck
desiring to be what you are not,
longing to be
what you can only visit.

Oh Annie! You got it. here is your last poem. maybe you couldn't wait. oh my dear how you found it.

The Rowing Endeth
I'm mooring my rowboat at the dock of the island called God.
This dock is made in the shape of a fish
and there are many boats moored
at many different docks.
"It's okay," I say to myself,
with blisters that broke and healed
and broke and healed--saving
themselves over and over.
And salt sticking to my face and arms like
a glue-skin pocked with grains of tapioca.
I empty myself from my wooden boat and onto the flesh of The Island.

"On with it!" He says and thus
we squat on the rocks by the sea
and play--can it be true--a
game of poker.
He calls me.
I win because I hold a royal straight flush.
He wins because He holds five aces.

A wild card had been announced
but I had not heard it
being in such a state of awe
when He took out the cards and dealt.
As he plunks down His five aces
and I sit grinning at my royal flush,
He starts to laugh,
the laughter rolling like a hoop out of His mouth
and into mine,
and such laughter that He doubles right over me
laughing a Rejoice Chores at our two triumphs.
Then I laugh, the fishy dock laughs
the sea laughs. The Island laughs.
The Absurd laughs.

Dearest dealer,

I with my royal straight flush,
love you so for your wild card,
that untamable, eternal, gut-driven ha-ha
and lucky love.

Anne! Thank-you Anne. Yes. That Jesus is the wild card. the untablelucky love. He is the fifth ace.
Dearest Dealer! I with my straight fulsh, love you so for your wild card!


Here is one more Anne Sexton poem for you:

The Touch
For months my hand was sealed off
in a tin box. Nothing was there but the subway railings.
Perhaps it is bruised, I thought,
and that is why they have locked it up.
You could tell time by this, I thought,
like a clock, by its five knuckles
and the thin underground veins.
It lay there like an unconscious woman
fed by tubes she knew not of.

The hand had collapse,
a small wood pigeon
that had gone into seclusion.
I turned it over and the palm was old,
its lines traced like fine needlepoint
and stitched up into fingers.
It was fat and soft and blind in places.
Nothing but vulnerable.

And all this is metaphor.
An ordinary hand -- just lonely
for something to touch
that touches back.
The dog won't do it.
Her tail wags in the swamp for a frog.
I'm no better than a case of dog food.
She owns her own hunger.
My sisters won't do it.
They live in school except for buttons
and tears running down like lemonade.
My father won't do it.
He comes in the house and even at night
he lives in a machine made by my mother
and well oiled by his job, his job.

The trouble is
that I'd let my gestures freeze.
The trouble was not
in the kitchen or the tulips
but only in my head, my head.

Then all this became history.
Your hand found mine.
Life rushed to my fingers like a blood clot.
Oh, my carpenter,
the fingers are rebuilt.
They dance with yours.
They dance in the attic and in Vienna.
My hand is alive all over America.
Not even death will stop it,
death shedding her blood.
Nothing will stop it, for this is the kingdom
and the kingdom come.