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To be without God is to be a snake / who wants to swallow an elephant.

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
Snakes
God
Wants
Without
Snake
Elephant
Swallow
Elephants

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All I am is the trick of words writing themselves.
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Oh thumb, I want a drink it is dark, where are the big people, when will I get there...?
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Don’t worry if they say you’re crazy. They said that about me and yet I was saner than all of them. I knew. No matter. You know. Insane or sane, you know. It’s a good thing to know - no matter what they call it.
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Inside many of us is a small old man who wants to get out.
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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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I think of myself as writing for one person, that one perfect reader who understands and loves.
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My mouth blooms like a cut.
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And we are magic talking to itself, noisy and alone. I am queen of all my sins forgotten. Am I still lost? Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself
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My ideas are a curse. They spring from a radical discontent with the awful order of things. I play clown. I play carpenter. I play nurse. I play witch.
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Yes I try to kill myself in small amounts, an innocuous occupation. Actually I'm hung up on it.
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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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Love? Be it man. Be it woman. It must be a wave you want to glide in on, give your body to it, give your laugh to it, give, when the gravelly sand takes you, your tears to the land. To love another is something like prayer and can't be planned, you just fall into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.
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And what of the dead? They lie without shoes in the stone boats. They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.
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I put the gold star up in the front window beside the flag. Alterations is what I know and what I did: hems, gussets and seams.
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I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s quart and downward into a lifetime’s ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman’s float.
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I must always forget how one word is able to pick out another, to manner another, until I have got something I might have said... but did not.
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And if I tried to give you something else, something outside myself, you would not know that the worst of anyone can be, finally, an accident of hope
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I cannot walk an inch / without trying to walk to God.
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The joy that isn't shared dies young.
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stop the darkness and its amputations and find the real McCoy in the private holiness of my hands.
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