I don’t care, I love you anyhow. It is too late to turn you out of my heart. Part of you lives here. - Anne Sexton

and God was there like an island I had not rowed to,
still ignorant of Him, my arms, and my legs worked,
and I grew, I grew,
I wore rubies and bought tomatoes
and now, in my middle age,
about nineteen in the head I'd say,
I am rowing, I am rowing
though the oarlocks stick and are rusty
and the sea blinks and rolls
like a worried eyebal,
but I am rowing, I am rowing,
though the wind pushes me back
and I know that that island will not be perfect,
it will have the flaws of life,
the absurdities of the dinner table,
but there will be a door
and I will open it
and I will get rid of the rat insdie me,
the gnawing pestilential rat.
God will take it with his two hands
and embrace it

What can I do with this memory?
Shake the bones out of it?
Defoliate the smile?
Stub out the chin with cigarettes?
Take the face of the man I love
and squeeze my foot into it,
when all the while my heart is making a museum?
I love you the way the oboe plays.
I love you the way skinny dipping makes my body feel.
I love you the way a ripe artichoke tastes.
Yet I fear you,
as one in the desert fears the sun.

I am ugly,
submerged in my own past
and my own madness