(Rimbaud’s “Feasts of Hunger” and Sexton’s “The Kiss”)
one
My mouth blooms like a cut.
My hunger, Anne, Anne,
Flee on your donkey.
I’ve been wronged all year, tedious
nights, nothing but rough elbows in them
If I have any taste, it is for hardly
Anything but earth and stones.
and delicate boxes of Kleenex calling crybaby
crybaby, you fool!
Dinn! dinn! dinn! dinn! Let us eat air,
Rock, coal, iron.
Before today my body was useless.
Now it’s tearing at its square corners.
My hungers, turn about. Graze, hungers,
on the meadow of bran!
It’s tearing old Mary’s garments off, knot by knot
and see—Now it’s shot full of these electric bolts.
Suck the bright poison
Of the bindweed;
Zing! A resurrection!
two
Eat
The pebbles a poor man breaks,
The stones of churches,
Once it was a boat, quite wooden
and with no business, no salt water under it
and in need of some paint.
The boulders, sons of floods,
Loaves lying in the gray valleys!
It was no more than a group of boards.
But you hoisted her, rigged her.
My hungers are bits of black air;
The blue trumpeter;
She’s been elected.
—It is my stomach pulling me.
It is woe.
My nerves are turned on. I hear them like
musical instruments.
Over the earth the leaves have come out!
Where there was silence
the drums, the strings are incurably playing.
I am going to the soft flesh of fruit.
You did this. Pure genius at work.
In the heart of the furrow I pick
Lamb’s lettuce and violet.
Darling, the composer has stepped into fire.
My hunger, Anne, Anne!
Flee on your donkey.