"My dear Lady Anne,
I've done what I can"
(Rolling Stones)
The good...
On the day of breasts and small hips
the window pocked with bad rain,
rain coming on like a minister,
we coupled, so sane and insane.
We lay like spoons while the sinister
rain dropped like flies on our lips
and our glad eyes and our small hips.
(from "Song for a Lady", Anne Sexton)
The bad...
A voice that eludes reason, manner of insistences,
hope doubled upon oration, bubbles the turf you
won't be wanting any more in the morning
My name is "Interrogation Rooms"
My name is "Refamiliarization"
My name is "Standing Up and Ripping Through"
as if you could name love
without turning it into an abstraction
& killing it
(from "Taps", Charles Bernstein)
______________________________________
Now Bernstein's poem's already done its worst by the time you get to the refrain. How? Again, the same bubbling through (as of gas) to the surface.Yes, "bubble the turf". I can believe we're talking about 'love' in both cases here but only in order to look at "Taps" as the cause of death. Bernstein's is gas main warning to wary diggers. Yes, here's the poem so portentously murderous it killed Anne Sexton long after her time. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E kills just like this.
It's not as far-fetched as it looks. Consider. Sexton's is a pure window on loving, with or without morning. So it wasn't necessary for Bernstein to foreground "Taps" in light at all. Through the fragility and even cute mousiness of physical intimacy Sexton gives the most pleasurable song imaginable to the world, with or without names. Damn, "light" and the very name for it in Bernstein's poem fly from each other like exploding gas molecules! Anyone looking for love poetry after this is bound to be staring into nothing but noxious dusk. Epithalamiums like Anne's, on the other hand, can make the stars race because she was as clever as you, Ph.d boy, and looked as ravishing as a middle-aged Liz Taylor, with or without small hips, & could love "so sane and insane" it'd even make your own wife glad for eyes, if you weren't so busy archiving. So Anne died twice: once in her car and then on Bernstein's bubbling turf.
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E kills in just this way.
