an oldie but goodie - the kiss by anne sexton

Thought of this poem today while getting my hair done. I read it for the first time at Duke Young Writer's Camp when I was 14. Summer, North Carolina, a beautiful campus and poetry. Who could ask for anything more?

This is from memory.. so it's more or less correct..

my mouth blooms like a cut
i've been wronged all year, tedious
nights, nothing but rough elbows in them and
tedious boxes of kleenex calling
crybaby, crybaby you fool!

before today my body was useless,
now it's tearing at its square corners,
tearing old Mary's garments off
and now it's shot full of these electric bolts
and see - Zing! a resurrection!

Once it was a boat, quite wooden.
It was nothing more than a group of boards.
but you hoisted her, rigged her.
she's been elected.

my nerves are turned on .... i hear them like musical instruments....
where once there was silence the drums, the strings are incurably playing.
You did this.
Darling, the composer has stepped into fire.

Or something like that. You can Google it and see if I came close. I wonder why that poem was the one that came to my mind, rather than say, "An Irish Airman Forsees His Death" or "The Second Coming" both by Yeats or that one by Gerald Manley Hopkins about the ooze of oil crushed... all poems I have more or less committed to memory over the years because once a professor said it was a shame no one did that anymore and also because in my favorite childhood book, there was a mouse who helped his friends through the long winter by telling stories.