Anne Sexton - The Consecrating Mother lyrics

I stand before the sea and it rolls and rolls in its green blood saying, 'Do not give up one god for I have a handful.' The trade winds blew in their twelve-fingered reversal and I simply stood on the beach while the ocean made a cross of salt and hung up its drowned and they cried Deo Deo. The ocean offered them up in the vein of its might. I wanted to share this but I stood alone like a pink scarecrow. The ocean steamed in and out, the ocean gasped upon the shore but I could not define her, I could not name her mood, her locked-up faces. Far off she rolled and rolled like a woman in labor and I thought of those who had crossed her, in antiquity, in nautical trade, in slavery, in war. I wondered how she had borne those bulwarks. She should be entered skin to skin, and put on like one's first or last cloth, envered like kneeling your way into church, descending into that ascension, though she be slick as olive oil, as she climbs each wave like an embezzler of white. The big deep knows the law as it wears its gray hat, though the ocean comes in its destiny, with its one hundred lips, and in moonlight she comes in her nudity, flashing breasts made of milk-water, flashing bu*tocks made of unk**able lust, and at night when you enter her you shine like a neon soprano. I am that clumsy human on the shore loving you, coming, coming, going, and wish to put my thumb on you like The Song of Solomon.