45 Mercy Street-A Poem by Anne Sexton

45 Mercy Street By Anne Sexton (1928-1974)

In my dream,
drilling into the marrow of my entire bone,
my real dream,
I'm walking up and down Beacon Hill
searching for a street sign
- namely MERCY STREET.

Not there.

I try the Back Bay.
Not there.
Not there.
And yet I know the number.
45 Mercy Street.
I know the stained-glass window of the foyer,
the three flights of the house with its parquet floors.
I know the furniture and mother,
grandmother, great-grandmother, the servants.
I know the cupboard of Spode
the boat of ice, solid silver,
where the butter sits in neat squares
like strange giant's teeth on the big mahogany table.

I know it well.
Not there.
Where did you go?
45 Mercy Street,
with great-grandmother kneeling in her whale-bone corset
and praying gently but fiercely to the wash basin,
at five A.M.
at noon dozing in her wiggy rocker,
grandfather taking a nap in the pantry,
grandmother pushing the bell for the downstairs maid,
and Nana rocking Mother
with an oversized flower on her forehead
to cover the curl of when she was good
and when she was...

And where she was begat
and in a generation the third
she will beget, me,
with the stranger's seed blooming into the flower called Horrid.
I walk in a yellow dress
and a white pocketbook stuffed with cigarettes,
enough pills, my wallet, my keys,
and being twenty-eight, or is it forty-five?
I walk.
I walk.

I hold matches at street signs for it is dark,
as dark as the leathery dead
and I have lost my green Ford,
my house in the suburbs,
two little kids sucked up like pollen by the bee in me
and a husband who has wiped off his eyes in order not to see my inside out
and I am walking and looking
and this is no dream just my oily life
where the people are alibis
and the street is unfindable
for an entire lifetime.

Pull the shades down - I don't care!
Bolt the door, mercy, erase the number,
rip down the street sign,
what can it matter,
what can it matter to this cheapskate who wants to own the past
that went out on a dead ship and left me only with paper?

Not there.

I open my pocketbook, as women do,
and fish swim back and forth between the dollars and the lipstick.
I pick them out, one by one
and throw them at the street signs,
and shoot my pocketbook into the Charles River.
Next I pull the dream off and slam into the cement wall of the clumsy calendar I live in,
my life,
and its hauled up notebooks.