Written by
Anne Sexton |
"Angels of the love affair, do you know that other,
the dark one, that other me?"
1.
ANGEL OF FIRE AND GENITALS
Angel of fire and genitals, do you know slime,
that green mama who first forced me to sing,
who put me first in the latrine, that pantomime
of brown where I was beggar and she was king?
I said, "The devil is down that festering hole.
"
Then he bit me in the buttocks and took over my soul.
Fire woman, you of the ancient flame, you
of the Bunsen burner, you of the candle,
you of the blast furnace, you of the barbecue,
you of the fierce solar energy, Mademoiselle,
take some ice, take come snow, take a month of rain
and you would gutter in the dark, cracking up your brain.
Mother of fire, let me stand at your devouring gate
as the sun dies in your arms and you loosen it's terrible weight.
2.
ANGEL OF CLEAN SHEETS
Angel of clean sheets, do you know bedbugs?
Once in the madhouse they came like specks of cinnamon
as I lay in a choral cave of drugs,
as old as a dog, as quiet as a skeleton.
Little bits of dried blood.
One hundred marks
upon the sheet.
One hundred kisses in the dark.
White sheets smelling of soap and Clorox
have nothing to do with this night of soil,
nothing to do with barred windows and multiple locks
and all the webbing in the bed, the ultimate recoil.
I have slept in silk and in red and in black.
I have slept on sand and, on fall night, a haystack.
I have known a crib.
I have known the tuck-in of a child
but inside my hair waits the night I was defiled.
3.
ANGEL OF FLIGHT AND SLEIGH BELLS
Angel of flight and sleigh bells, do you know paralysis,
that ether house where your arms and legs are cement?
You are as still as a yardstick.
You have a doll's kiss.
The brain whirls in a fit.
The brain is not evident.
I have gone to that same place without a germ or a stroke.
A little solo act--that lady with the brain that broke.
In this fashion I have become a tree.
I have become a vase you can pick up or drop at will,
inanimate at last.
What unusual luck! My body
passively resisting.
Part of the leftovers.
Part of the kill.
Angels of flight, you soarer, you flapper, you floater,
you gull that grows out of my back in the drreams I prefer,
stay near.
But give me the totem.
Give me the shut eye
where I stand in stone shoes as the world's bicycle goes by.
4.
ANGEL OF HOPE AND CALENDARS
Angel of hope and calendars, do you know despair?
That hole I crawl into with a box of Kleenex,
that hole where the fire woman is tied to her chair,
that hole where leather men are wringing their necks,
where the sea has turned into a pond of urine.
There is no place to wash and no marine beings to stir in.
In this hole your mother is crying out each day.
Your father is eating cake and digging her grave.
In this hole your baby is strangling.
Your mouth is clay.
Your eyes are made of glass.
They break.
You are not brave.
You are alone like a dog in a kennel.
Your hands
break out in boils.
Your arms are cut and bound by bands
of wire.
Your voice is out there.
Your voice is strange.
There are no prayers here.
Here there is no change.
5.
ANGEL OF BLIZZARDS AND BLACKOUTS
Angle of blizzards and blackouts, do you know raspberries,
those rubies that sat in the gree of my grandfather's garden?
You of the snow tires, you of the sugary wings, you freeze
me out.
Leet me crawl through the patch.
Let me be ten.
Let me pick those sweet kisses, thief that I was,
as the sea on my left slapped its applause.
Only my grandfather was allowed there.
Or the maid
who came with a scullery pan to pick for breakfast.
She of the rols that floated in the air, she of the inlaid
woodwork all greasy with lemon, she of the feather and dust,
not I.
Nonetheless I came sneaking across the salt lawn
in bare feet and jumping-jack pajamas in the spongy dawn.
Oh Angel of the blizzard and blackout, Madam white face,
take me back to that red mouth, that July 21st place.
6.
ANGEL OF BEACH HOUSES AND PICNICS
Angel of beach houses and picnics, do you know solitaire?
Fifty-two reds and blacks and only myslef to blame.
My blood buzzes like a hornet's nest.
I sit in a kitchen chair
at a table set for one.
The silverware is the same
and the glass and the sugar bowl.
I hear my lungs fill and expel
as in an operation.
But I have no one left to tell.
Once I was a couple.
I was my own king and queen
with cheese and bread and rosé on the rocks of Rockport.
Once I sunbathed in the buff, all brown and lean,
watching the toy sloops go by, holding court
for busloads of tourists.
Once I called breakfast the sexiest
meal of the day.
Once I invited arrest
at the peace march in Washington.
Once I was young and bold
and left hundreds of unmatched people out in the cold.
|
Written by
Sylvia Plath |
(1)
This is the sea, then, this great abeyance.
How the sun's poultice draws on my inflammation.
Electrifyingly-colored sherbets, scooped from the freeze
By pale girls, travel the air in scorched hands.
Why is it so quiet, what are they hiding?
I have two legs, and I move smilingly.
.
A sandy damper kills the vibrations;
It stretches for miles, the shrunk voices
Waving and crutchless, half their old size.
The lines of the eye, scalded by these bald surfaces,
Boomerang like anchored elastics, hurting the owner.
Is it any wonder he puts on dark glasses?
Is it any wonder he affects a black cassock?
Here he comes now, among the mackerel gatherers
Who wall up their backs against him.
They are handling the black and green lozenges like the parts of a body.
The sea, that crystallized these,
Creeps away, many-snaked, with a long hiss of distress.
(2)
This black boot has no mercy for anybody.
Why should it, it is the hearse of a dad foot,
The high, dead, toeless foot of this priest
Who plumbs the well of his book,
The bent print bulging before him like scenery.
Obscene bikinis hid in the dunes,
Breasts and hips a confectioner's sugar
Of little crystals, titillating the light,
While a green pool opens its eye,
Sick with what it has swallowed----
Limbs, images, shrieks.
Behind the concrete bunkers
Two lovers unstick themselves.
O white sea-crockery,
What cupped sighs, what salt in the throat.
.
.
.
And the onlooker, trembling,
Drawn like a long material
Through a still virulence,
And a weed, hairy as privates.
(3)
On the balconies of the hotel, things are glittering.
Things, things----
Tubular steel wheelchairs, aluminum crutches.
Such salt-sweetness.
Why should I walk
Beyond the breakwater, spotty with barnacles?
I am not a nurse, white and attendant,
I am not a smile.
These children are after something, with hooks and cries,
And my heart too small to bandage their terrible faults.
This is the side of a man: his red ribs,
The nerves bursting like trees, and this is the surgeon:
One mirrory eye----
A facet of knowledge.
On a striped mattress in one room
An old man is vanishing.
There is no help in his weeping wife.
Where are the eye-stones, yellow and vvaluable,
And the tongue, sapphire of ash.
(4)
A wedding-cake face in a paper frill.
How superior he is now.
It is like possessing a saint.
The nurses in their wing-caps are no longer so beautiful;
They are browning, like touched gardenias.
The bed is rolled from the wall.
This is what it is to be complete.
It is horrible.
Is he wearing pajamas or an evening suit
Under the glued sheet from which his powdery beak
Rises so whitely unbuffeted?
They propped his jaw with a book until it stiffened
And folded his hands, that were shaking: goodbye, goodbye.
Now the washed sheets fly in the sun,
The pillow cases are sweetening.
It is a blessing, it is a blessing:
The long coffin of soap-colored oak,
The curious bearers and the raw date
Engraving itself in silver with marvelous calm.
(5)
The gray sky lowers, the hills like a green sea
Run fold upon fold far off, concealing their hollows,
The hollows in which rock the thoughts of the wife----
Blunt, practical boats
Full of dresses and hats and china and married daughters.
In the parlor of the stone house
One curtain is flickering from the open window,
Flickering and pouring, a pitiful candle.
This is the tongue of the dead man: remember, remember.
How far he is now, his actions
Around him like livingroom furniture, like a décor.
As the pallors gather----
The pallors of hands and neighborly faces,
The elate pallors of flying iris.
They are flying off into nothing: remember us.
The empty benches of memory look over stones,
Marble facades with blue veins, and jelly-glassfuls of daffodils.
It is so beautiful up here: it is a stopping place.
(6)
The natural fatness of these lime leaves!----
Pollarded green balls, the trees march to church.
The voice of the priest, in thin air,
Meets the corpse at the gate,
Addressing it, while the hills roll the notes of the dead bell;
A glittler of wheat and crude earth.
What is the name of that color?----
Old blood of caked walls the sun heals,
Old blood of limb stumps, burnt hearts.
The widow with her black pocketbook and three daughters,
Necessary among the flowers,
Enfolds her lace like fine linen,
Not to be spread again.
While a sky, wormy with put-by smiles,
Passes cloud after cloud.
And the bride flowers expend a fershness,
And the soul is a bride
In a still place, and the groom is red and forgetful, he is featureless.
(7)
Behind the glass of this car
The world purrs, shut-off and gentle.
And I am dark-suited and stil, a member of the party,
Gliding up in low gear behind the cart.
And the priest is a vessel,
A tarred fabric,sorry and dull,
Following the coffin on its flowery cart like a beautiful woman,
A crest of breasts, eyelids and lips
Storming the hilltop.
Then, from the barred yard, the children
Smell the melt of shoe-blacking,
Their faces turning, wordless and slow,
Their eyes opening
On a wonderful thing----
Six round black hats in the grass and a lozenge of wood,
And a naked mouth, red and awkward.
For a minute the sky pours into the hole like plasma.
There is no hope, it is given up.
|
Written by
Pablo Neruda |
The young maricones and the horny muchachas,
The big fat widows delirious from insomnia,
The young wives thirty hours' pregnant,
And the hoarse tomcats that cross my garden at night,
Like a collar of palpitating sexual oysters
Surround my solitary home,
Enemies of my soul,
Conspirators in pajamas
Who exchange deep kisses for passwords.
Radiant summer brings out the lovers
In melancholy regiments,
Fat and thin and happy and sad couples;
Under the elegant coconut palms, near the ocean and moon,
There is a continual life of pants and panties,
A hum from the fondling of silk stockings,
And women's breasts that glisten like eyes.
The salary man, after a while,
After the week's tedium, and the novels read in bed at night,
Has decisively fucked his neighbor,
And now takes her to the miserable movies,
Where the heroes are horses or passionate princes,
And he caresses her legs covered with sweet down
With his ardent and sweaty palms that smell like cigarettes.
The night of the hunter and the night of the husband
Come together like bed sheets and bury me,
And the hours after lunch, when the students and priests are masturbating,
And the animals mount each other openly,
And the bees smell of blood, and the flies buzz cholerically,
And cousins play strange games with cousins,
And doctors glower at the husband of the young patient,
And the early morning in which the professor, without a thought,
Pays his conjugal debt and eats breakfast,
And to top it all off, the adulterers, who love each other truly
On beds big and tall as ships:
So, eternally,
This twisted and breathing forest crushes me
With gigantic flowers like mouth and teeth
And black roots like fingernails and shoes.
|
Written by
Robert Lowell |
Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming
in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning,
I hog a whole house on Boston's
"hardly passionate Marlborough Street,"
where even the man
scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans,
has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate,
and is "a young Republican.
"
I have a nine months' daughter,
young enough to be my granddaughter.
Like the sun she rises in her flame-flamingo infants' wear.
These are the tranquilized Fifties,
and I am forty.
Ought I to regret my seedtime?
I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.
O.
,
and made my manic statement,
telling off the state and president, and then
sat waiting sentence in the bull pen
beside a ***** boy with curlicues
of marijuana in his hair.
Given a year,
I walked on the roof of the West Street Jail, a short
enclosure like my school soccer court,
and saw the Hudson River once a day
through sooty clothesline entanglements
and bleaching khaki tenements.
Strolling, I yammered metaphysics with Abramowitz,
a jaundice-yellow ("it's really tan")
and fly-weight pacifist,
so vegetarian,
he wore rope shoes and preferred fallen fruit.
He tried to convert Bioff and Brown,
the Hollywood pimps, to his diet.
Hairy, muscular, suburban,
wearing chocolate double-breasted suits,
they blew their tops and beat him black and blue.
I was so out of things, I'd never heard
of the Jehovah's Witnesses.
"Are you a C.
O.
?" I asked a fellow jailbird.
"No," he answered, "I'm a J.
W.
"
He taught me the "hospital tuck,"
and pointed out the T-shirted back
of Murder Incorporated's Czar Lepke,
there piling towels on a rack,
or dawdling off to his little segregated cell full
of things forbidden to the common man:
a portable radio, a dresser, two toy American
flags tied together with a ribbon of Easter palm.
Flabby, bald, lobotomized,
he drifted in a sheepish calm,
where no agonizing reappraisal
jarred his concentration on the electric chair
hanging like an oasis in his air
of lost connections.
.
.
.
|
Written by
Galway Kinnell |
For I can snore like a bullhorn
or play loud music
or sit up talking with any reasonably sober Irishman
and Fergus will only sink deeper
into his dreamless sleep, which goes by all in one flash,
but let there be that heavy breathing
or a stifled come-cry anywhere in the house
and he will wrench himself awake
and make for it on the run - as now, we lie together,
after making love, quiet, touching along the length of our bodies,
familiar touch of the long-married,
and he appears - in his baseball pajamas, it happens,
the neck opening so small
he has to screw them on, which one day may make him wonder
about the mental capacity of baseball players -
and flops down between us and hugs us and snuggles himself to sleep,
his face gleaming with satisfaction at being this very child.
In the half darkness we look at each other
and smile
and touch arms across his little, startling muscled body -
this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making,
sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake,
this blessing love gives again into our arms.
|
Written by
Bob Hicok |
The telephone company calls and asks what the fuss is.
Betty from the telephone company, who's not concerned
with the particulars of my life.
For instance
if I believe in the transubstantiation of Christ
or am gladdened at 7:02 in the morning to repeat
an eighth time why a man wearing a hula skirt of tools
slung low on his hips must a fifth time track mud
across my white kitchen tile to look down at a phone jack.
Up to a work order.
Down at a phone jack.
Up to a work order.
Over at me.
Down at a phone jack.
Up to a work order
before announcing the problem I have is not the problem
I have because the problem I have cannot occur
in this universe though possibly in an alternate
universe which is not the responsibility or in any way
the product, child or subsidiary of AT&T.
With practice
I've come to respect this moment.
One man in jeans,
t-shirt and socks looking across space at a man
with probes and pliers of various inclinations, nothing
being said for five or ten seconds, perhaps I'm still
in pajamas and he has a cleft pallet or is so tall
that gigantism comes to mind but I can't remember
what causes flesh to pile that high, five or ten seconds
of taking in and being taken in by eyes and a brain,
during which I don't build a shotgun from what's at hand,
oatmeal and National Geographics or a taser from hair
caught in the drain and the million volts of frustration
popping through my body.
Even though.
Even though his face
is an abstract painting called Void.
Even though
I'm wondering if my pajama flap is open, placing me
at a postural disadvantage.
Breathe I say inside my head,
which is where I store thoughts for the winter.
All
is an illusion I say by disassembling my fists, letting each
finger loose to graze.
Thank you I say to kill the silence
with my mouth, meaning **** you, meaning die
you shoulder-shrugging fusion of chipped chromosomes
and puss, meaning enough.
That a portal exists in my wall
that even its makers can't govern seems an accurate mirror
of life.
Here's the truce I offer: I'll pay whatever's asked
to be left alone.
To receive a fax from me stand beside
your mailbox for a week.
It will come in what appears
to be an envelope.
While waiting for the fax reintroduce
yourself to the sky.
It's often blue and will transmit
without fail everything clouds have been trying to say to you.
|
Written by
Charles Bukowski |
I was fairly drunk when it
began and I took out my bottle and used it
along the way.
I was reading a week or two after
Kandel and I did not look quite as
pretty but
I brought it off and we
ended up at the Webbs, 6, 8, 10 of
us, and I drank scotch, wine, beer, tequila
and noticed a nice one sitting next to me -
one tooth missing when she smiled,
lovely, and I put my arm around her
and began loading her with bullshit.
when I awakened at 10 a.
m.
the next morning
I was in a strange house
in bed with this
woman.
she was asleep but looked
familiar.
I got up and here was one kid running around in a
crib and another one running around the floor in
pajamas.
I picked up a letter addressed to one
"Betsy R.
", so I went back and said,
"hey, Betsy, there are kids running around all over
this place.
"
"oh Hank, damn it, I'm sick.
I want to sleep, not
rap.
"
"but look, the .
.
.
"
"make yourself some
coffee.
"
I put the pot on and the little boy ran up in his
pajamas.
I found a shirt and some pants and some
shoes and
dressed him.
then I cleaned a bottle with hot water, filled it
with milk and gave it to the kid in the
crib.
he went for
it.
then I went in and squeezed her
hand.
"I've got to go.
are you all
right ?"
"yes, a little sick.
but please don't feel
bad.
"
I called a yellow cab and we went back across
town.
is this what happened to
D.
Thomas ? I thought.
if a man didn't think too much he could be proud of his little
conquests -
except that the women were better than we - asking nothing
as we squirted our poetry
our bullshit our
sperm to
them.
we were sick poets sick
people.
across town I knocked on the door of my host and
hostess.
"what happened ?" they
asked.
"nothing.
got
lost.
"
they sat a beer in front of me
and I drank it as if I were
wordly:
a piece-of-ass
any-night
anywhere
type.
"somebody got a
cigarette ?" I asked.
"sure, sure.
"
I lit up and asked,
"heard from Creely
lately ?"
not giving a damn whether they had or
not.
|
Written by
Dylan Thomas |
I sit here on the 2nd floor
hunched over in yellow
pajamas
still pretending to be
a writer.
some damned gall,
at 71,
my brain cells eaten
away by
life.
rows of books
behind me,
I scratch my thinning
hair
and search for the
word.
for decades now
I have infuriated the
ladies,
the critics,
the university
suck-toads.
they all will soon have
their time to
celebrate.
"terribly overrated.
.
.
"
"gross.
.
.
"
"an aberration.
.
.
"
my hands sink into the
keyboard
of my
Macintosh,
it's the same old
con
that scraped me
off the streets and
park benches,
the same simple
line
I learned in those
cheap rooms,
I can't let
go,
sitting here
on this 2nd floor
hunched over in yellow
pajamas
still pretending to be
a writer.
the gods smile down,
the gods smile down,
the gods smile down.
Black Sparrow "New Year's Greeting" 1992
|
Written by
Thomas Lux |
How, in the first place, did
they get torn-pulled down hard
too many times: to hide a blow,
or sex, or a man
in stained pajamas? The tear blade-shaped,
serrated, in tatters.
And once,
in a house flatside to a gas station,
as snow fell at a speed and angle you could lean on,
two small hands (a patch of throat, a whip
of hair across her face)-
two small hands
parting a torn shade
to welcome a wedge of gray sunlight into that room.
|