The Earth

by Anne Sexton

The Earth 

God loafs around heaven,

without a shape

but He would like to smoke His cigar

or bite His fingernails

and so forth.

God owns heaven

but He craves the earth,

the earth with its little sleepy caves,

its bird resting at the kitchen window,

even its murders lined up like broken chairs,

even its writers digging into their souls

with jackhammers,

even its hucksters selling their animals

for gold,

even its babies sniffing for their music,

the farm house, white as a bone,

sitting in the lap of its corn,

even the statue holding up its widowed life,

but most of all He envies the bodies,

He who has no body.

The eyes, opening and shutting like keyholes

and never forgetting, recording by thousands,

the skull with its brains like eels-

the tablet of the world-

the bones and their joints

that build and break for any trick,

the genitals,

the ballast of the eternal,

and the heart, of course,

that swallows the tides

and spits them out cleansed.

He does not envy the soul so much.

He is all soul

but He would like to house it in a body

and come down

and give it a bath

now and then. 

In Memoriam

What's missing is the eyeballs

in each of us, but it doesn't matter

because you've got the bucks, the bucks, the bucks.

You let me touch them, fondle the green faces

lick at their numbers and it lets you be

my 'Daddy!' 'Daddy!' and though I fought all alone

with molesters and crooks, I knew your money

would save me, your courage, your 'I've had

considerable experience as a soldier…

fighting to win millions for myself, it's true.

But I did win,' and me praying for 'our men out there'

just made it okay to be an orphan whose blood was no one's,

whose curls were hung up on a wire machine and electrified,

while you built and unbuilt intrigues called nations,

and did in the bad ones, always, always,

and always came at my perils, the black Christs of childhood,

always came when my heart stood naked in the street

and they threw apples at it or twelve-day-old-dead-fish.

'Daddy!' 'Daddy,' we all won that war,

when you sang me the money songs

Annie, Annie you sang

and I knew you drove a pure gold car

and put diamonds in you coke

for the crunchy sound, the adorable sound

and the moon too was in your portfolio,

as well as the ocean with its sleepy dead.

And I was always brave, wasn't I?

I never bled?

I never saw a man expose himself.

No. No.

I never saw a drunkard in his blubber.

I never let lightning go in one car and out the other.

And all the men out there were never to come.

Never, like a deluge, to swim over my breasts

and lay their lamps in my insides.

No. No.

Just me and my 'Daddy'

and his tempestuous bucks

rolling in them like corn flakes

and only the bad ones died.

But I died yesterday,

'Daddy,' I died,

swallowing the Nazi-Jap animal

and it won't get out

it keeps knocking at my eyes,

my big orphan eyes,

kicking! Until eyeballs pop out

and even my dog puts up his four feet

and lets go

of his military secret

with his big red tongue

flying up and down

like yours should have

as we board our velvet train. 

The Fallen Angels 

They come on to my clean

sheet of paper and leave a Rorschach blot.

They do not do this to be mean,

they do it to give me a sign

they want me, as Aubrey Beardsley once said,

to shove it around till something comes.

Clumsy as I am,

I do it.

For I am like them -

both saved and lost,

tumbling downward like Humpty Dumpty

off the alphabet.

Each morning I push them off my bed

and when they get in the salad

rolling in it like a dog,

I pick each one out

just the way my daughter

picks out the anchovies.

In May they dance on the jonquils,

wearing out their toes,

laughing like fish.

In November, the dread month,

they suck the childhood out of the berries

and turn them sour and inedible.

Yet they keep me company.

They wiggle up life.

They pass out their magic

like Assorted Lifesavers.

They go with me to the dentist

and protect me form the drill.

At the same time,

they go to class with me

and lie to my students.

O fallen angel,

the companion within me,

whisper something holy

before you pinch me

into the grave.