A Reading

It was in my freshman year in college when I found myself suddenly freed of the protective wings of my mother's nest and released unsuspectingly into the real world. True, I wasn't with the Kerouacs or Cassidys, riding and driving in cross country orgies of food, booze, a few women (very few women), Buddhism and poetry, no I was too much in the midst of my disillusionment with Rod McKuen to know about beat poetry.

I stood in line that October, not knowing that just a year later, the woman I waited to see would take her blanket into her car and go to sleep forever while still parked in her garage. I only knew it was Anne, Anne Sexton, and though I didn't know much about her at the time, just her name alone exuded a sexuality we ached for. So I followed the line of English Majors, wannabe poets and others to listen to her speak and read.

In a small auditorium she read a poem to Dr. Y, talked of her books Live or Die and Love Poems and then read "That Awful Rowing Toward God." From the nods of the people surrounding me I could tell it was good, for me it was simply incredible. Of course she could have been reading from the phone book and I'd have liked it, the way she'd unconsciously toy with the button on her blouse as she read, letting it slip open in the final line of a poem.

After the reading I headed out of the auditorium, but being unfamiliar with the old, hallowed halls of the English Department, I looked for a restroom and got lost in a maze of small offices and tiny classrooms. I heard some talking coming from one and wandered in, quietly sitting in a seat at the back of the room.

I was mesmerized as Anne read, losing myself in her works, in the way she moved and in the way her blouse's buttons, one by one somehow came undone. Before long it was just her and I, I was in my underwear, she wore only her bra and a half-slip. Each poem now was just another step in the seduction as her words slipped past my waistband and curled around my cock.

There were no MILFs in those days, happily no AIDS as Anne's words slid over my body more sensuously than any tongue. Leaning back on the desk, my underwear now at my ankles I watched as her words opened, sucked me in and moved up and down my shaft, her rhyme tickling the head of my cock in small, fluttering rhythms.

She stood up as her bra slipped away and I lost myself in the flowing lines of her breasts, the pauses at her nipples as I gently sucked them into my mouth, my tongue learning the texture, yearning for more. Slipping her panties down over her hips, I scanned down stanza by stanza, over her stomach, her bellybutton and through the dark, curly hair.

My tongue then slipped between her pages and I tasted her, the warm, damp folds of verse, the tart taste of metaphor and the earthy wet of allusion. Her hips rhymed as she grabbed my head and pulled me into her book, exposing her most delicate self to me. After she came, she pulled my head up, kissed me on my lips, tasting herself on my lips, and then she whispered, "The joy that isn't shared dies young."

Moving to the carpeted floor, she opened her legs and I kneeled between them, letting her words guide me into herself. I moved, searching her depths for the meaning, feeling her deep inner pain, trying to extinguish her inner burning. It wasn't about love, not between us, now, for us, we fucked, but it was the words, the words that burned in us. So when we came, we came together, soaking ourselves in the poetry, and then flaccidly slipping apart, when we realized we had read them all.

I wandered back onto campus, waited in line once again, this time for the shuttle bus and wondered what, if any of it had been real. I went home, spread her books on my bed and then fell in among them, trying to feel her again. Little did I know that the following year, on October 4th, she'd close her garage door, climb into her car with a star covered blanket, start the engine and simply go to sleep, forever.

As Anne once said, "Death's in the goodbye." Goodbye Anne.