This is the key to it. <br />This is the key to everything. <br />Preciously. <br /> <br />I am worse than the gamekeeper's children <br />picking for dust and bread. <br />Here I am drumming up perfume. <br /> <br />Let me go down on your carpet, <br />your straw mattress - whatever's at hand <br />because the child in me is dying, dying. <br /> <br />It is not that I am cattle to be eaten. <br />It is not that I am some sort of street. <br />But your hands found me like an architect. <br /> <br />Jugful of milk! It was yours years ago <br />when I lived in the valley of my bones, <br />bones dumb in the swamp. Little playthings. <br /> <br />A xylophone maybe with skin <br />stretched over it awkwardly. <br />Only later did it become something real. <br /> <br />Later I measured my size against movie stars. <br />I didn't measure up. Something between <br />my shoulders was there. But never enough. <br /> <br />Sure, there was a meadow, <br />but no yound men singing the truth. <br />Nothing to tell truth by. <br /> <br />Ignorant of men I lay next to my sisters <br />and rising out of the ashes I cried <br />my sex will be transfixed! <br /> <br />Now I am your mother, your daughter, your brand new thing - a snail, a nest. <br />I am alive when your fingers are. <br /> <br />I wear silk - the cover to uncover - <br />because silk is what I want you to think of. <br />But I dislike the cloth. It is too stern. <br /> <br />So tell me anything but track me like a climber <br />for here is the eye, here is the jewel, <br />here is the excitement the nipple learns. <br /> <br />I am unbalanced - but I am not mad with snow. <br />I am mad the way young girls are mad, <br />with an offering, an offering… <br /> <br />I burn the way money burns.<br /><br />Anne Sexton<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-breast-3/
