Anne Sexton - Your Face on the Dog's Neck lyrics

It is early afternoon. You sit on the gra** with your rough face on the dog's neck Right now you are both as still as a snapshot. That infectious dog ought to let a fly bother her, ought to run out in an immense field, chasing rabbits and skunks, mauling the cars, licking insects off her rump, and stop using you up. My darling, why do you lean on her so? I would touch you, that pulse brooding under your Madras shirt, each shoulder the most well built house, the arms, thin birches that do not escape the breeze, the white teeth that have known me, that wait at the bottom of the brook and the tongue, my little fish!... but you are stopped in time. So I will speak of your eyes although they are closed. Tell me, where is each stubborn-colored iris? Where are the quick pupils that make the floor tilt under me? I see only the lids, as tough as riding boots. Why have your eyes gone into their own room? Goodnight the are saying from their little leathery doors. Or shall I sing of eyes that have been ruined with mercy and lust and once with your own d**h when you lay bubbling like a caught fish, s**ing on the manufactured oxygen? Or shall I sing of eyes that are resting so near the hair of that hateful animal? Love twists me, a Spanish flute plays in my blood, and yet I can see only your little sleep, an empty place. But when your eyes open against the wool stink of her thick hair, against the faintly sickening neck of that dog, whom I envy like a thief, what will I ask? Will I speak up saying, there is a hurried song, a certain seizure from which I gasp? Or will your eyes lie in wait, little field mice nestling on their paws? Perhaps they will say nothing, perhaps they will be dark and leaden, having played their own game somewhere else, somewhere far off. Oh, I have learned them and know that when they open and glance at me I will turn like a little dancer and then, quite simply, and all by myself, I will fall, bound to some mother/father, bound to your sight, bound for nowhere and everywhere. Or, perhaps, my darling, because it is early afternoon, I will forget that my voice is full of good people, forget how my legs could sprawl on the terrace, forget all that the birds might witness, the torn dress, the shoes lost in the arbor, while the neighbor's lawnmower bites and spits out some new little rows of innocent gra**. Certainly, I need not speak of it at all. I will crouch down and put my cheek near you, accepting this spayed and flatulent b**h you hold, letting my face rest in an a**embled tenderness on the old dog's neck.