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Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself, Counting this row and that row of moccasins Waiting on the silent shelf.

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
Shelf
Counting
Shelves
Silent
Waiting
Beautiful

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God is only mocked by believers.
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This is what poems are: with mercy for the greedy, they are the tongue's wrangle, the world's pottage, the rat's star.
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Man is a bird full of mud, I say aloud. And death looks on with a casual eye and scratches his anus.
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I rot on the wall, my own Dorian Gray.
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What's the point of fighting the dollars when all you need is a warm bed? When the dog barks you let him in. All we need is someone to let us in. And one other thing: to consider the lilies in the field.
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I think it will be a miracle if I don't someday end up killing myself.
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Every time I get happy the Nana-hex comes through. Birds turn into plumber's tools, a sonnet turns into a dirty joke, a wind turns into a tracheotomy, a boat turns into a corpse.
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Even without wars, life is dangerous.
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I brush my hair, waiting in the pain machine for my bones to get hard, for the soft, soft bones that were laid apart and were screwed together. They will knit. And the other corpse, the fractured heart, I feed it piecemeal, little chalice. I'm good to it.
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Come, my pretender, my fritter, my bubbler, my chicken biddy! Oh succulent one, it is but one turn in the road and I would be a cannibal!
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When the cow gives blood and the Christ is born we must all eat sacrifices. We must all eat beautiful women.
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I am alone here in my own mind. There is no map and there is no road. It is one of a kind just as yours is.
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Craft is a trick you make up to let you write the poem.
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Give me your skin as sheer as a cobweb, let me open it up and listen in and scoop out the dark.
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Blue eyes wash off sometimes.
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think of innocent Icarus who is doing quite well: larger than a sail, over the fog and the blast of the plushy ocean, he goes. Admire his wings!
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I keep feeling that there isn't one poem being written by any one of us - or a book or anything like that. The whole life of us writers, the whole product I guess I mean, is the one long poem - a community effort if you will. It's all the same poem. It doesn't belong to any one writer - it's God's poem perhaps. Or God's people's poem.
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Love your self's self where it lives.
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Sometimes the soul takes pictures of things it has wished for, but never seen.
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Talk to me about sadness. I talk about it too much in my own head but I never mind others talking about it either I occasionally feel like I tremendously need others to talk about it as well.
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