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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.

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

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My business is words. Words are like labels, or coins, or better, like swarming bees.
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I sit at my desk each night with no place to go, opening the wrinkled maps of Milwaukee and Buffalo, the whole U.S., its cemeteries, its arbitrary time zones, through routes like small veins, capitals like small stones.
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The windows, the starving windows that drive the trees like nails into my heart.
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Home is my Bethlehem, my succoring shelter, my mental hospital, my wife, my dam, my husband, my sir, my womb, my skull.
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Jewels! Today each twig is important, each ring, each infection, each form is all that the gods must have meant.
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Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.
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What's missing is the eyeballs in each of us, but it doesn't matter because you've got the bucks, the bucks, the bucks.
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It would be pleasant to be drunk.
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I tell you what you’ll never really know: all the medical hypothesis that explained my brain will never be as true as these struck leaves letting go.
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I would sell my life to avoid the pain that begins in the crib with its bars or perhaps with your first breath when the planets drill your future into you.
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Need is not quite belief.
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Don't bite till you know if it's bread or stone.
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I cannot walk an inch / without trying to walk to God.
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Father, you died once, salted down at fifty-nine, packed down like a big snow angel, wasn't that enough?
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But even in a telephone booth evil can seep out of the receiver and we must cover it with a mattress, and then tear it from its roots and bury it, bury it.
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Be careful of words, / ... they can be both daisies and bruises.
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For forty days, for forty nights Jesus put one foot in front of the other and the man he carried, if it was a man, became heavier and heavier.
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Evil is maybe lying to God. Or better, lying to love.
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Daylight is nobody's friend. God comes in like a landlord and flashes on his brassy lamp.
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With this pen I take in hand my selves and with these dead disciples I will grapple. Though rain curses the window let the poem be made.
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