WHEN MAN ENTERS WOMAN by Anne Sexton

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.


Image Source

No Pure Air

My original plan for this Easter post was to quote Anne Sexton's 'Rowing' from "The Awful Rowing Toward God", a book of hers I was given a long time ago.  While traveling this week, I picked up The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton, but in rereading it this morning, I decided not to quote it today.  I thought it might echo my own ambivalent feelings about God and to some extent it does, but it just didn't feel right to me today, just a little too despairing.  So I went to my folder and this is the next poem that came up.  It started as a sort of Beat, 'stream of consciousness' poem that got morphed and clean up to this final version.  It is not a pretty poem, that is for sure.  I am sure that I must have been feeling lost and in despair that I could write anything at all.  The funny thing is over the six months or so I worked on the poem (six drafts, no less) from July 31, 1979 to March 25, 1980, the title changed with each draft.  So here are the title changes, a little bit of verse in itself.

Untitled

Crack!

Conversation with Lenin in exile in 1902

Conversation with Luther in exile in 1902 

Conversations with Luther and Lenin in exile in 1902

Conversations with Luther and Trotsky in exile in 1902

Poet in exile

Conversations with Luther and Trotsky in exile in 1902

Poet in exile

No Pure Air

Does that help explain the theme at all?  Maybe. I will admit that the end is full of pretensions and give that up to youth.  There are a few interesting images, perhaps, that make up for the rest. Glad at least to say that I seldom feel this kind of despair.


No Pure Air


Crack! split back spine
paunched fish guts
red glistening organs so
perfect and glossy   burst
spilt bile all over
snow white beaches already
so soaked as to be 
                              full.
Gross putrid failures
befoul us   bring us down
down into the sulphurous
depths   into the chamber pot
old fart hell of
                       failure.


No pure air
only gagging doubts like mustard
gas floating over barbed
wire   muckholes   agent orange
dead   rotting   leaves   babies   women
(how little war has changed)


Drunken piss covered pants   men wander
the streets   panhandling   scaring
the bourgeois hell out
of us in our patrician
                                 complacency.


Striving to give . . . .what?
there is no reality
only images we feel
                               make
                                          die for.