> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://poetry101.love/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# For My Lover, Returning To His Wife
- URL: https://poetry101.love/for-my-lover-returning-to-his-wife/
- Published: 2024-11-25T04:57:41.000Z
- Updated: 2024-12-05T20:50:57.000Z
- Description: by Anne Sexton
- Author: Melissa Anderson
- Tags: #Import 2026-11-04 19:11

She is all there.  
She was melted carefully down for you  
and cast up from your childhood,  
cast up from your one hundred favorite aggies.  
She has always been there, my darling.  
She is, in fact, exquisite.  
Fireworks in the dull middle of February  
and as real as a cast-iron pot.  
Let's face it, I have been momentary.  
A luxury. A bright red sloop in the harbor.  
My hair rising like smoke from the car window.  
Littleneck clams out of season.  
She is more than that. She is your have to have,  
has grown you your practical your tropical growth.  
This is not an experiment. She is all harmony.  
She sees to oars and oarlocks for the dinghy,  
has placed wild flowers at the window at breakfast,  
sat by the potter's wheel at midday,  
set forth three children under the moon,  
three cherubs drawn by Michelangelo,  
done this with her legs spread out  
in the terrible months in the chapel.  
If you glance up, the children are there  
like delicate balloons resting on the ceiling.  
She has also carried each one down the hall  
after supper, their heads privately bent,  
two legs protesting, person to person,  
her face flushed with a song and their little sleep.  
I give you back your heart.  
I give you permission —  
for the fuse inside her, throbbing  
angrily in the dirt, for the bitch in her  
and the burying of her wound —  
for the burying of her small red wound alive —  
for the pale flickering flare under her ribs,  
for the drunken sailor who waits in her left pulse,  
for the mother's knee, for the stocking,  
for the garter belt, for the call —  
the curious call  
when you will burrow in arms and breasts  
and tug at the orange ribbon in her hair  
and answer the call, the curious call.  
She is so naked and singular  
She is the sum of yourself and your dream.  
Climb her like a monument, step after step.  
She is solid.  
As for me, I am a watercolor.  
I wash off.

Sexton, Anne. [Selected Poems of Anne Sexton](https://www.google.com/books/edition/Selected%5FPoems%5Fof%5FAnne%5FSexton/AZoc-CKhlm0C?hl=en&gbpv=0&kptab=getbook&ref=poetry101.love). United States, Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

---

### Why I chose this poem

I have loved this since I first read it as a teenager, the way the narrator, an "other" woman, draws this portrait of the wife with such tenderness and finesse. I loved later, how she recognizes the woman herself, naked and singular, and the projection: the wife as the sum of *his* self, *his* dreams. And the juxtaposition of the monument and the watercolor. One so solid, one so fleeting. 

Current me feels this as a poetic stepping off point for pondering attachment styles and mental health.