Anne Sexton

Love Letter Written In A Burning Building

I am in a crate, the crate that was ours,

full of white shirts and salad greens,

the icebox knocking at our delectable knocks,

and I wore movies in my eyes,

and you wore eggs in your tunnel,

and we played sheets, sheets, sheets

all day, even in the bathtub like lunatics.

But today I set the bed afire

and smoke is filling the room,

it is getting hot enough for the walls to melt,

and the icebox, a gluey white tooth.

I have on a mask in order to write my last words,

and they are just for you, and I will place them

in the icebox saved for vodka and tomatoes,

and perhaps they will last.

The dog will not. Her spots will fall off.

The old letters will melt into a black bee.

The night gowns are already shredding

into paper, the yellow, the red, the purple.

The bed — well, the sheets have turned to gold —

hard, hard gold, and the mattress

is being kissed into a stone.

As for me, my dearest Foxxy,

my poems to you may or may not reach the icebox

and its hopeful eternity,

for isn't yours enough?

The one where you name

my name right out in P.R.?

If my toes weren't yielding to pitch

I'd tell the whole story —

not just the sheet story

but the belly-button story,

the pried-eyelid story,

the whiskey-sour-of-the-nipple story —

and shovel back our love where it belonged.

Despite my asbestos gloves,

the cough is filling me with black and a red powder seeps through my

veins,

our little crate goes down so publicly

and without meaning it, you see, meaning a solo act,

a cremation of the love,

but instead we seem to be going down right in the middle of a Russian

street,

the flames making the sound of

the horse being beaten and beaten,

the whip is adoring its human triumph

while the flies wait, blow by blow,

straight from United Fruit, Inc.