Anne Sexton - Crossing the Atlantic lyrics

We sail out of season into on oyster-gray wind, over a terrible hardness. Where Dickens crossed with mal de mer in twenty weeks or twenty days I cross toward him in five. Wraped in robes- not like Caesar but like liver with bacon- I rest on the stern burning my mouth with a wind-hot ash, watching my ship bypa** the swells as easily as an old woman reads a palm. I think; as I look North, that a field of mules lay down to die. The ship is 27 hours out. I have entered her. She might be a whale, sleeping 2000 and ship's company, the last 40¢ martini and steel staterooms where night goes on forever. Being inside them is, I think, the way one would dig into a planet and forget the word light. I have walked cities, miles of mole alleys with carpets. Inside I have been ten girls who speak French. They languish everywhere like bedsheets. Oh my Atlantic of the cracked shores, those blemished gates of Rockport and Boothbay, those harbor smells like the innards of animals! Old childish Queen, where did you go, you bayer at wharfs and Victorian houses? I have read each page of my mother's voyage. I have read each page of her mother's voyage. I have learned their words as they learned Dickens'. I have swallowed these words like bullets. But I have forgotten the last guest-terror. Unlike them, I cannot toss in the cabin as in childbirth. Now always leaving me in the West is the wake, a ragged bridal veil, unexplained, seductive, always rushing down the stairs, never detained, never enough. The ship goes on as though nothing else were happening. Generation after generation, I go her way. She will run East, knot by knot, over an old bloodstream, stripping it clear, each hour ripping it, pounding, pounding, forcing through as through a virgin. Oh she is so quick! This dead street never stops!