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It doesn't matter who my father was it matters who I remember he was.

Anne Sexton

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Anne Sexton
Age: 45 †
Born: 1928
Born: November 9
Died: 1974
Died: October 4
Poet
Writer
Newton
Massachusetts
Anne Gray Harvey
Death
Fathering
Doesn
Fatherhood
Remember
Daddy
Matter
Dad
Children
Matters
Grief
Daughter
Father

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My life has appeared unclothed in court, detail by detail, death-bone witness by death-bone witness, and I was shamed at the verdict.
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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.
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The sky breaks. It sags and breathes upon my face. in the presence of mine enemies, mine enemies The world is full of enemies. There is no safe place.
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Everyone has left me except my muse, that good nurse. She stays in my hand, a mild white mouse.
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Now that I have written many words, and let out so many loves, for so many, and been altogether what I always was a woman of excess, of zeal and greed, I find the effort useless.
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The stars are pears that no one can reach, even for a wedding. Perhaps for a death.
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It is in the small things we see it. The child's first step, as awesome as an earthquake. The first time you rode a bike, wallowing up the sidewalk.
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Craft is a trick you make up to let you write the poem.
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God is only mocked by believers.
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I am not lazy. I am on the amphetamine of the soul. I am, each day, typing out the God my typewriter believes in.
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Now, in my middle age, about nineteen in the head I'd say, I am rowing, I am rowing.
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We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb. Sucking on it!
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And tonight our skin, our bones, that have survived our fathers, will meet, delicate in the hold, fastened together in an intricate lock. Then one of us will shout, My need is more desperate! and I will eat you slowly with kisses even though the killer in you has gotten out.
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Jesus saw the multitudes were hungry and He said, Oh Lord, send down a short-order cook.
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Depression is boring, I think and I would do better to make some soup and light up the cave.
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The ground has on its clothes. The trees poke out of sheets and each branch wears the sock of God.
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God went out of me as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, as if the sun became a latrine. God went out of my fingers. They became stone. My body became a side of mutton and despair roamed the slaughterhouse.
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I lay there silently, hoarding my small dignity. I did not ask about the gate or the closet. I did not question the bedtime ritual where, on the cold bathroom tiles, I was spread out daily and examined for flaws. I did not know that my bones, those solids, those pieces of sculpture would not splinter.
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Emerald as heavy as a golf course, ruby as dark as an afterbirth, diamond as white as sun on the sea.
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I tell it stories now and then and feed it images like honey. I will not speculate today with poems that think they're money.
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