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The tongue, the Chinese say, is like a sharp knife: it kills without drawing blood.

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
Like
Kills
Knives
Sharp
Chinese
Tongue
Drawing
Blood
Without
Knife

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Take your foot out of the graveyard, they are busy being dead.
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Once upon a time we were all born, popped out like jelly rolls forgetting our fishdom, the pleasuring seas, the country of comfort, spanked into the oxygens of death.
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life is a trick, life is a kitten in a sack.
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We are America. We are the coffin fillers. We are the grocers of death. We pack them in crates like cauliflowers.
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All who love have lied.
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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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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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True. There is a beautiful Jesus. He is frozen to his bones like a chunk of beef. How desperately he wanted to pull his arms in! How desperately I touch his vertical and horizontal axes! But I can't. Need is not quite belief.
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There is no word for time. Today we will not think to number another summer or watch its white bird into the ground.
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Poems aren't postcards to send home.
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Why are all these dolls falling out of the sky? Was there a father? Or have the planets cut holes in their nets and let our childhood out, or are we the dolls themselves, born but never fed?
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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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All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children.... I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can't build little white picket fences to keep the nightmares out.
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Don't bite till you know if it's bread or stone.
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The future is a fog that is still hanging out over the sea, a boat that floats home or does not. The trade winds blow me, and I do not know where the land is the waves fold over each other they are in love with themselves sleeping in their own skin and I float over them and I do not know about tomorrow.
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It is June. I am tired of being brave.
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I grow old on my bitterness.
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Nature is full of teeth that come in one by one, then decay, fall out.
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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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