The full poem “Eighteen Days Without You” by Anne Sexton

* * *

December 1st

As we kissed good-bye

you made a little frown.

Now Christ’s lights are

twinkling all over town.

The cornstalks are broken

in the field, broken and brown.

The pond at the year’s end

turns her gray eyelid down.

Christ’s lights are

twinkling all over town.

A cat green ice spread

out over the front lawn.

The hemlocks are the only

young thing left. You are gone.

I hibernated under the covers

last night, not sleeping until dawn

came up light twilight and the oak leaves

whispered like money, those hangers on.

The hemlocks are the only

young thing left. You are gone.

December 2nd

I slept last night

under a bird’s shadow

dreaming of nuthatches at the feeder,

jailed to its spine, jailed right

down to the toes, waiting for slow

death in the hateful December snow.

Mother’s death came in the spotlight

and mother slamming the door when I need her

and you at the door yesterday,

you at a loss, grown white,

saying what lovers say.

But in my dream

you were a weird stone man

who sleepwalked in, whose features did not change,

your mouth sewn like a seam,

a dressmaker’s dummy who bean

without legs and a caved-in waist, my old puritan.

You were all muslin, a faded cream

and I put you in six rooms to rearrange

your doors and your thread popped and spoke,

ripping out an uncovered scream

from which I awoke.

Then I took a pill to sleep again

and I wa a criminal in solitary,

both cripple and crook

who had picked ruby eyes from men.

One-legged I became and then

you dragged me off by your Nazi hook.

I wa the piece of bad meat they made you carry.

I was bruised. You could not miss.

Dreaming gives one such bad luck

and I had ordered this.

December 3rd

This is the mole-

gray mouth of the year.

Yesterday I stole

out to your hunter’s cabin studio,

surprising two woodchucks and a deer

outside our makeshift bungalow.

On the way to Groton

I saw a dead rabbit

in the road, rotten

with crows pecking at his green entrails.

It’s nature, you would have said from habit

and continued on to cocktails.

The sun dogs were

in the sky overhead.

You, my voyager,

were dogging up the old globe going west

and I was at the feeder where juncos fed.

Alone in our place I was a guest.

December 4th

And where did we meet?

Was it in London on Carnaby Street?

Was it in Paris on the Left Bank?

That there that I can thank?

No. It was Harvard Square

at the kiosk with both of us crying.

I can thank that there –

the day Jack Kennedy was dying.

And an hour later he was dead.

The brains fell out of his dazzling head.

And we cried and drank our whiskey straight

and the world remembers the date, the date.

And we both wrote poems we couldn’t write

and cried together the whole long night

and fell in love with a delicate breath

on the eve that great men call for death.

December 5th

That was Oswald’s November

four long years ago.

I remember meeting secretly once a week or oftener,

know it wrong, but having those reasons.

So I commute to your studio,

my smooth smith, my softener.

We take love in all its seasons.

This is the last picture page

of the calendar.

Now I feel my age,

watching the feverish birds outside

pocketing grain in their beaks.

The wind is bizarre.

The wind goes boo, boo, boo at my side

and the kitchen faucet leaks.

This is the last leaf

in the year’s book.

Now I come to grief

as the earth’s breast goes hard and mean

and hay is packed for the manger.

Down by the brook

frogs freeze like chessmen and can’t be seen

and you are gone, my stranger.

December 6th

A light rain, as tranquil as an apple, today…

mild and supple and fat and full-blown sweet

like the last February 2nd on Groundhog Day.

He wouldn’t come out and we lay odds

that his Mickey Mouse nose would greet

us, that his coma wasn’t part of the gods.

We thought he’d show at the Candlemass,

show his Chippewa shadow at eleven a.m.

We thought that coldblooded thing would pass

like a priest with his mouthful of beets

for the emerging mystic and the stratagem

that his wide awake show meets.

December 7th

Pearl Harbor Day.

The cruciform.

No rain last night, but an icestorm.

Jewels! Today each twig is important,

each ring, each infection, each form

is all that the gods must have meant.

Pearl Harbor Day

leaves scars.

Silver flies in the wind, little stars,

little eye pennies pock up and pock up

and the broken mirrors scatter far

and all the watch parts fill my cup.

Each rock is news.

Each has arrived.

The birds, those beggars, are hardly alive,

feathers like stone and the sealed in food.

Owls force mice into the open. Owls thrive.

The ice will do the birds, or come unglued.

December 8th

In winter without you I send

a Florida postcard to myself

to somehow remind me of the week

after mid-July and towards the end

when scummy Dog Days were on the shelf

and we had a week of our own to spend.

Snakes snapped their venom

and leftover sparklers were lit

and Roman dogs sniffed the milkweed

from which fertile perfume had come.

Small blackcaps came bit by bit

and we came too, from our need.

The sumac had red heads on display

and the good blood moved into every lamb,

tomatoes and snap beans under Sirius,

field corn and field mice came to stay.

Mornings I washed our plates of egg and jam.

Our last light a whippoorwill spoke to us.

December 9th

Two years ago, Reservist,

you would have burned

your draft card or

else have gone A.W.O.L.

But you stayed to serve

the Air Force. Your head churned

with bad solutions, carrying

your heart like a football

to the goal, your good heart

that never quite ceases

to know its wrong. From

Frisco you made a phone call

Next they manufactured you into an Aero-medic

who placed together shot off pieces

of men. Some were sent off

too dead to be sick.

But I wrote no diary

for that time then

and you what you

do today is worse.

Today you unload the bodies of men

out at Travis Air Force

Base – that curse –

no trees, a crater

surrounded by hills.

The Starlifter

from Vietnam, the multi-hearse

jets in. One hundred come day by day

just forty-eight hours

after death, filled

sometimes with as

many as sixty coffins in array.

Manual Minus Number

Sixteen Handbook

prefers to call this

the human remains.

This is the stand

that the world took

with the enemy’s children

and the enemy’s gains.

You unload them slipping

in their rubber sacks

within an aluminum coffin-

those human remains,

always the head higher

than the ten little toes.

They are priority when

they are shipped back

with four months pay

and a burial allotment

that they enclose.

All considerations

for these human remains!

They must have an escort!

They are classified!

Never jettisoned in

emergencies from any planes.

Stay aboard! More important

now that they’e died.

You say, “You’re treated like

shit until you’re killed.”

And then brought into The Cave,

those stamped human remains

on a Starlifter, a Cargomaster,

a packet, a Hercules

while napalm is in the frying pan,

while napalm is in the death nest.

And what was at home

was The Peace March-

this Washington we seize.

December 10th

I think today of the animal sounds,

how last night a rebellious fox

was barking out like Lucifer.

When the Beaver Moon lit up the ground

oak twigs scratched like mice in a box.

How in March we waited for the Hyla Crucifer,

those playbell peepers, those one-nice twinkletoes

that come with sticky pads into life when the ice goes.

Mostly it’s soundless, the world sealed in,

life turned upside down and down the lock.

So I will remember, remember cicadas in August,

their high whine like a hi-fi, shrill and thin

and when you asked me if I were old enough to darn a sock

I cried and then you held me just as you must

and of course we’re not married, we are a pair of scissors

who come together to cut, without towels saying His. Hers.

December 11th

Then I think of you in bed,

your tongue half chocolate, half ocean,

of the houses that you swing into,

of the steel wool hair on your head,

of your persistent hands and then

how we gnaw at the barrier because we are two.

How you come and take my blood cup

and link me together and take my brine.

We are bare. We are stripped to the bone

and we swim in tandem and go up and up

the river, the identical river called Mine

and we enter together. No one’s alone.

December 12th

And what of me?

I work each day in my

leotards at the State School

where the retarded are

locked up with hospital techniques.

Always I walk past the hydro-

cephalic doorman on his stool,

a five-year-old who sits

all day and never speaks,

his head like a twenty-five

cent balloon, three times

the regular size. It’s nature

but nature works such crimes.

I go to the large cement

day room where fifty kids

are locked up for what

they strangely call play.

The toys are not around,

not given to my invalids

because possessions might get

broken or in the way.

We can’t go out. There are no

snowsuits, sometimes no shoes

so what I do for them is what

I bring for them to use.

The room stinks of urine.

Only the two-headed baby

is antiseptic in her crib.

Now I take the autoharp,

the drum, the triangle,

the tambourine and the keys

for locked doors and locked

sounds, blind and sharp.

We have clapping of hands

and stamping of feet, please.

I play my humming and lullaby

sounds for each disease.

I sing The Fox Came Out

On a Chilly Night

and Bobby, my favorite

Mongoloid sings Fox to me.

I bring out my silk scarfs

for a group of sprites.

Susan wants the blue scarf

and no in is orderly.

I sway with two red scarfs.

I’m in a trance,

calling love me, woo, woo

and we all passionately dance.

December 13th

Remember that day last June

in the month of the Long-Day-Beauty

that is called Indians’ Wawe-Pesin?

I tell you Summer came not one day too soon

and surely the calendar did its duty

and we stayed a weekend at the Provincetown Inn.

Remember that thunder storm in July

when the lightning came down the hill-

and I wore my sneakers to stay brave-

came rolling down like a beach ball to fry

and hang inside of the outdoor stone grill,

a toy fire that wouldn’t behave?

Remember that barhopping hunt

for a good whiskey and a straight rye,

The Old Overholt with a picture of Washington

looking somewhat constipated on the front

or The Wild Turkey with the crossed eyes-

bourbon we tossed down until we were numb?

December 14th

The migratory birds

have flown the coop

but they’ll be back

with their built-in compass.

They’ll come back that way

the circus does each year-

with aerialists, our angular

birds that loop the loop.

Two years ago you bought

seats for the children in us.

Children of all ages

the ninety-sixth season is here!

La Toria held by her

wrist to a skyward rope

executed upwards of one

hundred body turns.

The lines in their cruel

cages marched up and down.

And FIREMAN SAVE MY CHILD

let midgets bring us hope,

scurrying to the scene, toy

engines while the toy fire burned.

On the outside, two days before

someone murdered a clown.

The ceiling was strung

up with tenement laundry.

A clown tied a bib on a lion

and fed him like a baby.

Ponies dressed like camels,

poodles dressed like whores

and Doval the Great with his

precious toes (I didn’t want to see)

climbed up over the elephants

and the children into immortality.

And you had your pocket picked,

you boyish conspirator.

December 15th

The day of the lonely drunk

is here. No weather reports,

no fox, no birds, no sweet chipmunks,

no sofa game, no summer resorts.

No whatever it was we had,

no sky, no month- just booze.

The half moon is acid, bitter sad

as I sing the Blended Whiskey Blues.

December 16th

Once upon a time

you grew up in a bedroom the size of a dime

and shared it with your sister. That was West End

Avenue in Manhattan. Longing for country you were penned

into city, peering across the Hudson at Palisades Park.

The boy in you played stickball until it was dark.

Once upon a time

I was the only child forbidden to climb

over the garden wall. I didn’t dare to speak

up over the Victorian houseful of rare antiques.

My dolls were all proper, waiting in neat rows.

My room was high ceilinged, lonely and full of echoes.

Once upon a time

you said, “Now that the cabin is ours, I’m

going to run the power in.” And we had a power party.

I made gingham curtains. We nailed up your Doctoral degree.

We turned the stove on twice. Oh my love, oh my louse,

we make our own electricity while we play house.

December 17th

Today I bought a Scotch Pine-

O Tannenbaum- a Christmas tree,

as green as a turtle, a forest

of gum and resin and turpentine.

My love, my louse, my absentee,

alone in our place I was not a guest.

With my box from the Five and Dime

I hung bells and balls and silver floss

and one intense strand of reds and greens.

At the end I topped off the ragged pine

with a flashy star, the five point cross

that twinkles for the Nazarene.

Doing this reminded me of the fall awards

we gave to different trees, First Prize

was tacked upon the rock maple

in Lincoln Center, then out towards

Weston we pinned Best Birch at Sunrise.

We took our census of colors not people.

The purple oaks, the quivering aspens,

those heavy popes the color of old coins;

the woodbine- each with an award on its trunk,

pinned by us with home-made ribbons

on Columbus Day. Prizes when acid joins

the pigment and the sap has been drunk.

Today I bought a sprig of mistletoe,

all warts and leaves and fruit

and stem- the angel of the kiss-

and hung it in our bungalow.

My love, we will take root

during the Christmas Armistice.

December 18th

Swift boomerang, come get!

I am delicate. You’ve been gone.

The losing has hurt me some, yet

I must bend for you. See me arch. I’m turned on.

My eyes are lawn-colored, my hair brunette.

Kiss the package, Mr. Bind!

Yes? Would you consider hurling yourself

upon me, rigorous but somehow kind?

I am laid out like paper on your cabin kitchen shelf.

So draw me a breast. I like to be underlined.

Look, lout! Say yes!

Draw me like a child. I shall need

merely two round eyes and a small kiss.

A small o. Two earrings would be nice. Then proceed

to the shoulder. You may pause at this.

Catch me. I’m your disease.

Please go slow all along the torso

drawing beads and mouths and trees

and o’s, a little graffiti and a small hello

for I grab, I nibble, I lift, I please.

Draw me good, draw me warm.

Bring me your raw-boned wrist and your

strange, Mr. Bind, strange stubborn horn.

Darling, bring with this an hour of undulations, for

this is the music for which I was born.

Lock in! Be alert, my acrobat

and I will be soft wood and you the nail

and we will make fiery ovens for Jack Sprat

and you will hurl yourself into my tiny jail

and we will take a supper together and that

will be that.