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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
Swallow
Elephants
Snakes
God
Wants
Without
Snake
Elephant

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One can't build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.
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I try to take care and be gentle to them. Words and eggs must be handled with care. Once broken they are impossible things to repair.
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I grow old on my bitterness.
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It's all a matter of history. Brandy is no solace. Librium only lies me down like a dead snow queen. Yes! I am still the criminal.
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Images are the heart of poetry ... You're not a poet without imagery.
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The tongue, the Chinese say, is like a sharp knife: it kills without drawing blood.
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If you meet a cross-eyed person you must plunge into the grass, alongside the chilly ants, fish through the green fingernails and come up with the four-leaf clover.
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I can only sign over everything, the house, the dog, the ladders, the jewels, the soul, the family tree, the mailbox. Then I can sleep. Maybe.
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All the oxygen of the world was in them. All the feet of the babies of the world were in them. All the crotches of the angels of the world were in them. All the morning kisses of Philadelphia were in them.
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And tonight our skin, our bones, that have survived our fathers, will meet, delicate in the hold, fastened together in an intricate lock. Then one of us will shout, My need is more desperate! and I will eat you slowly with kisses even though the killer in you has gotten out.
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Somebody who should have been born is gone. Yes, woman, such logic will lead to loss without death. Or say what you meant, you coward . . . this baby that I bleed.
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I burn the way money burns.
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You who have inhabited me in the deepest and most broken place, are going, going
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I tell it stories now and then and feed it images like honey. I will not speculate today with poems that think they're money.
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So I won't hang around in my hospital shift, repeating The Black Mass and all of it. I say Live, Live because of the sun, the dream, the excitable gift.
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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'm hunting for the truth. It might be a kind of poetic truth, and not just a factual one, because behind everything that happens to you, there is another truth, a secret life.
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The little girl skipped by under the wrinkled oak leaves and held fast to a replica of herself.
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Yesterday I did not want to be borrowed but this is the typewriter that sits before me and love is where yesterday is at.
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