Because Anne Sexton ended up taking her own life, this poem — with its brief, defiant rejection of suicide - is all the more poignant. Like most people who love poetry, I’ve connected with different poets at different times over the years, but there are only a handful whose complete body of work has always moved me. Robinson Jeffers is one, and Sexton another. I’ve never put this poem up for TSP before, largely because it’s so viscerally connected to a very dark time in my life. (It’s also a bit longer than what normally goes up, so it’s beneath the fold.)
I remember reading the collected works of Anne Sexton over and over again during a fourteen-day involuntary stay on the locked psych ward at what was then CPC Alhambra, a private facility a few miles from Pasadena. It was the summer of 1996, and I was near bottom, having only just survived yet another suicide attempt, this time by massive overdose of prescription drugs. In the hospital, I was heavily medicated, but I still found comfort in books: Robertson Davies’ “Deptford Trilogy” and an anthology of Sexton. If the staff had been more literarily inclined, they might have confiscated the latter text. I’m glad they didn’t, because I found much comfort in this difficult, breathtaking poem.
And often, that chaotic June and July, I said to myself “Even crazy, I’m nice as a chocolate bar.” I still say it sometimes now. But what really resonated for me in that summer were the last eight lines. And as it happened, in no small way thanks to Sexton, I made it through that dark time by discovering “I am not what I expected.” And in the end, I said “Live”. It still hurts me that Sexton, whose own madness so closely paralleled my own, didn’t end up saying the same in the end.
Live
“Live or die, but don’t poison everything…”
Well, death’s been here
for a long time –
it has a hell of a lot
to do with hell
and suspicion of the eye
and the religious objects
and how I mourned them
when they were made obscene
by my dwarf-heart’s doodle.
The chief ingredient
is mutilation.
And mud, day after day,
mud like a ritual,
and the baby on the platter,
cooked but still human,
cooked also with little maggots,
sewn onto it maybe by somebody’s mother,
the damn bitch!
Even so,
I kept right on going on,
a sort of human statement,
lugging myself as if
I were a sawed-off body
in the trunk, the steamer trunk.
This became perjury of the soul.
It became an outright lie
and even though I dressed the body
it was still naked, still killed.
It was caught
in the first place at birth,
like a fish.
But I play it, dressed it up,
dressed it up like somebody’s doll.
Is life something you play?
And all the time wanting to get rid of it?
And further, everyone yelling at you
to shut up. And no wonder!
People don’t like to be told
that you’re sick
and then be forced
to watch
you
come
down with the hammer.
Today life opened inside me like an egg
and there inside
after considerable digging
I found the answer.
What a bargain!
There was the sun,
her yolk moving feverishly,
tumbling her prize –
and you realize she does this daily!
I’d known she was a purifier
but I hadn’t thought
she was solid,
hadn’t known she was an answer.
God! It’s a dream,
lovers sprouting in the yard
like celery stalks
and better,
a husband straight as a redwood,
two daughters, two sea urchings,
picking roses off my hackles.
If I’m on fire they dance around it
and cook marshmallows.
And if I’m ice
they simply skate on me
in little ballet costumes.
Here,
all along,
thinking I was a killer,
anointing myself daily
with my little poisons.
But no.
I’m an empress.
I wear an apron.
My typewriter writes.
It didn’t break the way it warned.
Even crazy, I’m as nice
as a chocolate bar.
Even with the witches’ gymnastics
they trust my incalculable city,
my corruptible bed.
O dearest three,
I make a soft reply.
The witch comes on
and you paint her pink.
I come with kisses in my hood
and the sun, the smart one,
rolling in my arms.
So I say Live
and turn my shadow three times round
to feed our puppies as they come,
the eight Dalmatians we didn’t drown,
despite the warnings: The abort! The destroy!
Despite the pails of water that waited,
to drown them, to pull them down like stones,
they came, each one headfirst, blowing bubbles the color of cataract-blue
and fumbling for the tiny tits.
Just last week, eight Dalmatians,
3/4 of a lb., lined up like cord wood
each
like a
birch tree.
I promise to love more if they come,
because in spite of cruelty
and the stuffed railroad cars for the ovens,
I am not what I expected. Not an Eichmann.
The poison just didn’t take.
So I won’t hang around in my hospital shift,
repeating The Black Mass and all of it.
I say Live, Live because of the sun,
the dream, the excitable gift.
Thanks for this.