This is a total splurge that I just need to get down and out! Requires major dissection, but there you go. Am getting into the tortured subjectivity of Anne Sexton; the kind of experience that is the agent of personal metamorphosis of almost mythical proportions is also supposed to be the theme of me work for the next semester, so if any of you guys have any suggestions as to what would be good subjects to address, I'd be pleased for some inspiration! Just a mere 60-80 poems' worth, that's all!! This is a good write for me today - I'm in agony with a badly twisted pelvis (don't ask!!) and can't sit down, so have to be quick... :( K xx

EGYPT'S BALM


In tattered rags of bleeding soul
her carnality is spent;
with last gasp and foaming mouth
she craves final absolution,
hungry to rise transfigured.

Out there, sometime, somewhere,
someone sucks her tortured brain
through breaths of flaming nostrils;
stripping burned threads of nerve-ends
through her swollen, soldered fingertips
he knaws the broken bone of her heart,
lovingly licking her wounds.

He's the One preserving her,
making her whole, intact -
honouring her fleshly fragility:
He mummifies her beautiful,
painting her detail with precision
in each painful operation.
She becomes an opened treasure,
discovered, recovered, restored:
a glittering display of the wealth
of a priest-king's sarcophagus.

He is the silent, saviour sphinx -
her confessor who,
seeing, hearing, speaking no evil,
absorbs her naked into himself,
casting her dregs into solar winds:
the desert-storm furnace that sears intensely,
then is forever gone.

Appearing, she will know him:
cleansed by fire her flesh will burn,
become consecrated ground;
her scorching sands will bathe full-flood,
her spirit drench for flight.

Passion in extremis;
Exodus;
The journey begun.