Love, With Anne Sexton

It is her
when I look in the mirror.

It is her too
when I reach out in the dark room.

The mirror
encompasses the surface, the silver face,

the tea knees, the ashen
gray weavings of her eyes.

Who were these
neighborhoods you haunted? Where

was that street you wrote about?
I imagine it through the opaque light of a glass of milk.

Who, what dwarf hobbled next to you
that no one else could see? I see him. I see him as myself.

I feel you in my sleep
picking at my toes, my

genitals--
free from the honey of the mountain,

washed
with cold water directly from your lake.

Anne makes a painting of herself.
Anne is the painting, doubled in the moon,

her little armless selves
fly in the night.

The white fingernailed
hands and wrists of lovers

are pressed against the screen,
oh no, half of your face is the sun.

Maybe this time
you will exercise using a mallet on your skull,

maybe you will sing again like a body—
I conjure you

sitting on the wicker chair,
made out of pillows and the black form of a cat.

We will eat, again,
at the cheapest Italian restaurant in Beacon Hill.

Out there, the wind.
It doesn’t have writing, the mirror is on sale.

From this she introduces me,
her waxy melodies of sleep are nodding here in the room

resembling a shark
skimming the bottom, barely breathing.

No breasts, no familiar scents, no gills, no red
blood or cherry pits.

Her pasture is the bottom of its mouth, its tongue,
the sounds in the room, its black eye.

Now the cats around her
are burning in great piles. Ours is there. Gas lingers.

Her corpse is still warm and
damn, it happened again as we reflected on her face,

plus the sounds of the wind
and a bit of this other woman’s snore, faces in leaves.

What if I did not put stamps upon
the letters to your houses, Anne,

to tell your sisters, your babies, your brothers
that you are dead?

Why do the dead come around with so much
vague regret? Do

none of you really know
what’s happened?

You don’t have children anymore.
You don’t have dogs.