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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
Survives
Wondering
Fragile
Grass
Ground
Wonder
Break
Anything
Stout

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When I'm writing, I know I'm doing the thing I was born to do.
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Oh sharp diamond, my mother! I could not count the cost of all your faces, your moods that present that I lost. Sweet girl, my deathbed, my jewel-fingered lady...
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Rats live on no evil star
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I have forgiven all the old actors for dying. A new one comes on with the same lines, like large white growths, in his mouth. The dancers come on from the wings, perfectly mated.
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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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Even without wars, life is dangerous.
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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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You cutting the lawn, fixing the machines, all this leprous day and then more vodka, more soda and the pond forgiving our bodies, the pond sucking out the throb.
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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 Its mouth opens four times as out-of-date as a prehistoric monster, yet somehow man-made.
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Today life opened inside me like an egg.
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Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house, marvelous elation. It’s as though I could fly.
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All considerations for these human remains! They must have an escort! They are classified!
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Perhaps I am no one. True, I have a body and I cannot escape from it. I would like to fly out of my head, but that is out of the question.
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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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Someone is dead. Even the trees know it, those poor old dancers who come on lewdly, all pea-green scarfs and spine pole.
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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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I was only sitting here in my white study with the awful black words pushing me around.
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The silence is death. It comes each day with its shock to sit on my shoulder, a white bird, and peck at the black eyes and the vibrating red muscle of my mouth.
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I'll Vacuum up my stale hair, I'll pay all my neighbors' bad debts, I'll write a poem called Yellow and put my lips down to drink it up.
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unless I can shake myself free of my dog, my flag, of my desk, my mind, I find life a bit of a drag. Not always, mind you. Usually I'm like my frying pan useful, graceful, sturdy and with no caper, no plan.
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