Any man quoting a poem by Anne Sexton is probably on shaky ground. You think you know what she is talking about, but there is an uneasy feeling that you are missing the point entirely and it only remains for some woman to point that out to you. That being said, I still feel that Sexton speaks to me from time to time. She once wrote "This loneliness is just an exile from God." My entire personal theology could be summed up in that one line (the key? 'only'). So I am going to give this a go. I think I have her point in this poem. If not, there is a legion ready to correct me. This poem is from The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975), a book that was a gift and a curse and has haunted me for decades.
When man
enters woman,
like the surf biting the shore,
again and again,
and the woman opens her mouth in pleasure
and her teeth gleam
like the alphabet,
Logos appears milking a star,
and the man
inside of woman
ties a knot
so that they will
never again be separate
and the woman
climbs into a flower
and swallows its stem
and Logos appears
and unleashes their rivers.
This man,
this woman
with their double hunger,
have tried to reach through
the curtain of God
and briefly they have,
though God
in His perversity
unties the knot.
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