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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=345465" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>The Double Image</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">1.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I am thirty this November.<br>You are still small, in your fourth year.<br>We stand watching the yellow leaves go queer,<br>flapping in the winter rain.<br>falling flat and washed. And I remember<br>mostly the three autumns you did not live here.<br>They said I'd never get you back again.<br>I tell you what you'll never really know:<br>all the medical hypothesis<br>that explained my brain will never be as true as these<br>struck leaves letting go.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I, who chose two times<br>to kill myself, had said your nickname<br>the mewling mouths when you first came;<br>until a fever rattled<br>in your throat and I moved like a pantomine<br>above your head. Ugly angels spoke to me. The blame,<br>I heard them say, was mine. They tattled<br>like green witches in my head, letting doom<br>leak like a broken faucet;<br>as if doom had flooded my belly and filled your bassinet,<br>an old debt I must assume.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Death was simpler than I'd thought.<br>The day life made you well and whole<br>I let the witches take away my guilty soul.<br>I pretended I was dead<br>until the white men pumped the poison out,<br>putting me armless and washed through the rigamarole<br>of talking boxes and the electric bed.<br>I laughed to see the private iron in that hotel.<br>Today the yellow leaves<br>go queer. You ask me where they go I say today believed<br>in itself, or else it fell.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Today, my small child, Joyce,<br>love your self's self where it lives.<br>There is no special God to refer to; or if there is,<br>why did I let you grow<br>in another place. You did not know my voice<br>when I came back to call. All the superlatives<br>of tomorrow's white tree and mistletoe<br>will not help you know the holidays you had to miss.<br>The time I did not love<br>myself, I visited your shoveled walks; you held my glove.<br>There was new snow after this.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">2.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">They sent me letters with news<br>of you and I made moccasins that I would never use.<br>When I grew well enough to tolerate<br>myself, I lived with my mother, the witches said.<br>But I didn't leave. I had my portrait<br>done instead.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Part way back from Bedlam<br>I came to my mother's house in Gloucester,<br>Massachusetts. And this is how I came<br>to catch at her; and this is how I lost her.<br>I cannot forgive your suicide, my mother said.<br>And she never could. She had my portrait<br>done instead.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I lived like an angry guest,<br>like a partly mended thing, an outgrown child.<br>I remember my mother did her best.<br>She took me to Boston and had my hair restyled.<br>Your smile is like your mother's, the artist said.<br>I didn't seem to care. I had my portrait<br>done instead.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">There was a church where I grew up<br>with its white cupboards where they locked us up,<br>row by row, like puritans or shipmates<br>singing together. My father passed the plate.<br>Too late to be forgiven now, the witches said.<br>I wasn't exactly forgiven. They had my portrait<br>done instead.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">3.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">All that summer sprinklers arched<br>over the seaside grass.<br>We talked of drought<br>while the salt-parched<br>field grew sweet again. To help time pass<br>I tried to mow the lawn<br>and in the morning I had my portrait done,<br>holding my smile in place, till it grew formal.<br>Once I mailed you a picture of a rabbit<br>and a postcard of Motif number one,<br>as if it were normal<br>to be a mother and be gone.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">They hung my portrait in the chill<br>north light, matching<br>me to keep me well.<br>Only my mother grew ill.<br>She turned from me, as if death were catching,<br>as if death transferred,<br>as if my dying had eaten inside of her.<br>That August you were two, by I timed my days with doubt.<br>On the first of September she looked at me<br>and said I gave her cancer.<br>They carved her sweet hills out<br>and still I couldn't answer.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">4.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">That winter she came<br>part way back<br>from her sterile suite<br>of doctors, the seasick<br>cruise of the X-ray,<br>the cells' arithmetic<br>gone wild. Surgery incomplete,<br>the fat arm, the prognosis poor, I heard<br>them say.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">During the sea blizzards<br>she had here<br>own portrait painted.<br>A cave of mirror<br>placed on the south wall;<br>matching smile, matching contour.<br>And you resembled me; unacquainted<br>with my face, you wore it. But you were mine<br>after all.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I wintered in Boston,<br>childless bride,<br>nothing sweet to spare<br>with witches at my side.<br>I missed your babyhood,<br>tried a second suicide,<br>tried the sealed hotel a second year.<br>On April Fool you fooled me. We laughed and this<br>was good.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">5.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I checked out for the last time<br>on the first of May;<br>graduate of the mental cases,<br>with my analysts's okay,<br>my complete book of rhymes,<br>my typewriter and my suitcases.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">All that summer I learned life<br>back into my own<br>seven rooms, visited the swan boats,<br>the market, answered the phone,<br>served cocktails as a wife<br>should, made love among my petticoats</div><div style="margin:10px 0">and August tan. And you came each<br>weekend. But I lie.<br>You seldom came. I just pretended<br>you, small piglet, butterfly<br>girl with jelly bean cheeks,<br>disobedient three, my splendid</div><div style="margin:10px 0">stranger. And I had to learn<br>why I would rather<br>die than love, how your innocence<br>would hurt and how I gather<br>guilt like a young intern<br>his symptons, his certain evidence.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">That October day we went<br>to Gloucester the red hills<br>reminded me of the dry red fur fox<br>coat I played in as a child; stock still<br>like a bear or a tent,<br>like a great cave laughing or a red fur fox.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">We drove past the hatchery,<br>the hut that sells bait,<br>past Pigeon Cove, past the Yacht Club, past Squall's<br>Hill, to the house that waits<br>still, on the top of the sea,<br>and two portraits hung on the opposite walls.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">6.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">In north light, my smile is held in place,<br>the shadow marks my bone.<br>What could I have been dreaming as I sat there,<br>all of me waiting in the eyes, the zone<br>of the smile, the young face,<br>the foxes' snare.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">In south light, her smile is held in place,<br>her cheeks wilting like a dry<br>orchid; my mocking mirror, my overthrown<br>love, my first image. She eyes me from that face<br>that stony head of death<br>I had outgrown.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The artist caught us at the turning;<br>we smiled in our canvas home<br>before we chose our foreknown separate ways.<br>The dry redfur fox coat was made for burning.<br>I rot on the wall, my own<br>Dorian Gray.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">And this was the cave of the mirror,<br>that double woman who stares<br>at herself, as if she were petrified<br>in time - two ladies sitting in umber chairs.<br>You kissed your grandmother<br>and she cried.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">7.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I could not get you back<br>except for weekends. You came<br>each time, clutching the picture of a rabbit<br>that I had sent you. For the last time I unpack<br>your things. We touch from habit.<br>The first visit you asked my name.<br>Now you will stay for good. I will forget<br>how we bumped away from each other like marionettes<br>on strings. It wasn't the same<br>as love, letting weekends contain<br>us. You scrape your knee. You learn my name,<br>wobbling up the sidewalk, calling and crying.<br>You can call me mother and I remember my mother again,<br>somewhere in greater Boston, dying.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I remember we named you Joyce<br>so we could call you Joy.<br>You came like an awkward guest<br>that first time, all wrapped and moist<br>and strange at my heavy breast.<br>I needed you. I didn't want a boy,<br>only a girl, a small milky mouse<br>of a girl, already loved, already loud in the house<br>of herself. We named you Joy.<br>I, who was never quite sure<br>about being a girl, needed another<br>life, another image to remind me.<br>And this was my worst guilt; you could not cure<br>or soothe it. I made you to find me.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Anne+Sexton">Anne Sexton</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=345465" data-title="The Double Image de Anne Sexton" data-description="1.

I am thirty this November.
You are still small, in your fourth year.
We stand watching the yellow leaves go queer,
flapping in the winter rain.
falling flat and washed. And I remember
mostly the three autumns you did not live here.
They said I..."></div>
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