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The grass as bristly and stout as chives and me wondering when the ground will break and me wondering how anything fragile survives

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
Ground
Wonder
Break
Anything
Stout
Survives
Wondering
Fragile
Grass

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Blind with love, my daughter has cried nightly for horses, those long-necked marchers and churners that she has mastered, any and all, reigning them in like a circus hand.
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I rot on the wall, my own Dorian Gray.
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The little girl skipped by under the wrinkled oak leaves and held fast to a replica of herself.
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Of course the New Testament is very small. Its mouth opens four times as out-of-date as a prehistoric monster, yet somehow man-made.
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life is a trick, life is a kitten in a sack.
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The boys and girls are one tonight. They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies. They take off shoes. They turn off the light. The glimmering creatures are full of lies. They are eating each other. They are overfed. At night, alone, I marry the bed.
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I did not know the woman I would be nor that blood would bloom in me each month like an exotic flower, nor that children, two monuments, would break from between my legs.
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we do not explain my husband's insane abuse and we do not say why your wild-haired wife has fled or that my father opened like a walnut and then was dead. Your palms fold over me like knees. Love is the only use.
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Yes, I know. Death sits with his key in my lock. Not one day is taken for granted. Even nursery rhymes have put me in hock.
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It would be pleasant to be drunk.
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I am crazy as hell, but I know it. And knowing it is a kind of sanity that makes the sickness worse.
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But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build. Twice I have so simply declared myself, have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy, have taken on his craft, his magic.
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All the oxygen of the world was in them. All the feet of the babies of the world were in them. All the crotches of the angels of the world were in them. All the morning kisses of Philadelphia were in them.
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Take adultery or theft. Merely sins. It is evil who dines on the soul, stretching out its long bone tongue. It is evil who tweezers my heart, picking out its atomic worms.
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Writers are such phonies: they sometimes have wise insights but they don't live by them at all. That's what writers are like...you think they know something, but usually they are just messes.
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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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It's all a matter of history. Brandy is no solace. Librium only lies me down like a dead snow queen. Yes! I am still the criminal.
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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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It doesn't matter who my father was it matters who I remember he was.
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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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