Quote

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.

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
Side
Dried
Went
Stone
Sides
Fingers
Body
Stones
Roamed
Like
Despair
Sandpaper
Sea
Slaughterhouse
Sun
Mutton
Became
Slaughterhouses

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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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Inside many of us is a small old man who wants to get out.
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I cannot walk an inch / without trying to walk to God.
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Frog has no nerves. Frog is as old as a cockroach. Frog is my father's genitals. Frog is a malformed doorknob. Frog is a soft bag of green.
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Today life opened inside me like an egg.
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Death's in the good-bye.
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it was my first doll that water went into and water came out of much earlier it was the diaper I wore and the dirt thereof and my mother hating me for it
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bike downtown, stick out tongues at the Catholics. Or form a Piss Club where we all go in the bushes and peek at each other's sex.
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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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Look to your heart that flutters in and out like a moth. God is not indifferent to your need. You have a thousand prayers but God has one.
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It is a dead heart. It is inside of me. It is a stranger yet once it was agreeable, opening and closing like a clam.
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Even so, I must admire your skill. You are so gracefully insane.
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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 think it will be a miracle if I don't someday end up killing myself.
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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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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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Abundance is scooped from abundance yet abundance remains.
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Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.
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O yellow eye, let me be sick with your heat, let me be feverish and frowning.
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Images are probably the most important part of the poem. First of all you want to tell a story, but images are what are going to shore it up and get to the heart of the matter.
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