Amy Newman

Revising a Poem, Anne Sexton Thinks About Mercy

Favored by angels, Lot stands
yards from the rude ones, brutes
stumbling to his strange door.
This is the free space, the step-by-step
by which the tale ascends.

Everything’s made human by its flaw.
The angels are ready for sleep,
having arrived as if through a channel,
their imaginary bodies buoyant in thistle,
and animals nearby, murmuring straw.

Should she pursue, with her eye
for the mercy on which the Bible’s tenderness
hangs like a myth in ether? Your crookedness
forgiven, liabilities exposed.
A careless angel, transparent, nearby

admitting that notch of light
so you may offer your human throat
for the beast to note each craving error.
The light forcing that affliction open.
Imagine a body absolved, salt-white

narrative, calm and devout:
your opposite, your mirror life.
Anne had been inelegant, wife
in a honeycomb of illness,
and poetry took her hand, led her out.

Yet others writhe behind. Bible studies
overlook the passage where Lot
offers his virgin daughters to the crowd
in infinite cold terms. And in Judges,
we pass over the concubine, cut in pieces,

bloody. (How these quieted obsessions arrive.
You can scour the ruins where angels
gazed elsewhere, and angry men
fought and fucked the narrative.
Her side of that story did not survive.)

This is why, in the holy book,
Lot’s wife looks back in the narrative,
why she disregards you, angel, denying
your neglect. How she whirls, revising
herself visible in the story. Look.

---

Sylvia Plath is on the Night Train from Paris

with a lover asleep and the Olivetti
on the floor of the compartment.
The dark unfolding outside the window
is an infinite religious space.
Her mind branches, trying out crashing,
inadequate metaphors.

Just days ago, she had changed one word
in a problem line, leaving noun for adjective,
describing the end, not the means.
Then such a silvery-white there was!
The language transformed, ductile, like metal.
That was arrival, novitiate, your darling cell.

The train leans into lightening sky.
To her left are lemon trees, yolk-yellow
relenting fruit, and pastel houses
on exquisite, fertile land. Close-up,
the bright flowers purge their seeds,
tiny, crisp coats flung finally out.

On the right, the Mediterranean
forces itself repeatedly in blue,
carrying on under an adamant sun.
There had been a moon in the night, hadn’t there,
a romantic spot on the eye somewhere?
But who remembers such dopiness,

given this vertebral infinite, this agitation?
On the other side of this sea is Egypt,
where the girl saint evaporated to a pureness,
while the anchorite suffered his body,
combustible in devotion, and giving up.
Now the train unloads every inch of the past,

absolving in a lustrous violence.
She would like to be taken by force
into the terrible sea
for the malice that powers the heart for real,
and shaken until she sees stars, snarling white,
abrasive and well-meaning.