Wanting to Die BY ANNE SEXTON Since you ask, most days I cannot remember. I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage. Then the almost unnameable lust returns. Even then I have nothing against life. I know well the…devamıWanting to Die
BY ANNE SEXTON
Since you ask, most days I cannot remember.
I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage.
Then the almost 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 language.
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 after year,
to so delicately undo an old wound,
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 the book carelessly open,
something unsaid, the phone off the hook
and the love whatever it was, an infection.
sircafanusta_“…Then she compares carpenters who always ask which tool to use rather than asking why to build at first place,…devamı“…Then she compares carpenters who always ask which tool to use rather than asking why to build at first place, to her desire of suicide; she only cares about how to make her death perfect rather than asking why she wants to die at the first place. This takes me to Anne sexton’s obsession with dying perfectly; she admitted once after Sylvia Plath’s death:
‘I don’t want to die in some hospital – or something I’m afraid of. I’m so fascinated with Sylvia’s death: the idea of dying perfect, certainly not mutilated; virginity is unmutilated, not yet spoiled . . . I’d rather die than have a breast removed – talk about mutilation! By then time they were done with my mother – or life was done with my mother or Nana! My father had this thing about perfection, physical perfection that is – Sleeping Beauty remained perfect’”