Wanting To Die

[س.م.ي.ر]

Wanting To Die
Anne Sexton

*
Since you ask, most days I cannot remember.
I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage.
Then the most unnameable lust returns.
.
Even then I have nothing against life.
I know well the grass blades you mention
the furniture you have placed under the sun.
.
But suicides have a special ********.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.
.
Twice I have so simply declared myself
have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,
have taken on his craft, his magic.
.
In this way, heavy and thoughtful,
warmer than oil or water,
I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole.
.
I did not think of my body at needle point.
Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone.
Suicides have already betrayed the body.
.
Still-born, they don't always die,
but dazzled, they can't forget a drug so sweet
that even children would look on and smile.
.
To thrust all that life under your tongue! --
that, all by itself, becomes a passion.
Death's a sad bone; bruised, you'd say,
.
and yet she waits for me, year and year,
to so delicately undo an old would,
to empty my breath from its bad prison.
.
Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet,
raging at the fruit, a pumped-up moon,
leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss,
.
leaving the page of a book carelessly open,
something unsaid, the phone off the hook
and the love, whatever it was, an infection