Anne Sexton - The Lost Ingredient lyrics

Almost yesterday, those gentle ladies stole to their baths in Atlantic Cuty, for the lost rites of the first sea of the first salt running from a faucet. I have heard they sat for hours in briny tubs, patting hotel towels sweetly over shivered skin, smelling the stale harbor of a lost ocean, praying at last for impossible loves, or new skin, or still another child. And since this was the style, I don't suppose they knew what they had lost. Almost yesterday, pushing West, I lost ten Utah driving minutes, stopped to steal past postcard vendors, crossed the hot slit of macadam to touch the marvelous loosed bobbing of The Salt Lake, to honor and a**ault it in its proof, to wash away some slight need for Maine's coast. Later the funny salt itched in my pores and stung like bees or sleet. I rinsed it off on Reno and hurried to steal a better proof at tables where I always lost. Today is made of yesterday, each time I steal toward rites I do not know, waiting for the lost ingredient, as if salt or money or even lust would keep us calm and prove us whole at last.