Quote

we do not explain my husband's insane abuse and we do not say why your wild-haired wife has fled or that my father opened like a walnut and then was dead. Your palms fold over me like knees. Love is the only use.

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
Father
Explain
Haired
Love
Abuse
Fled
Like
Wild
Fold
Husband
Folds
Dead
Palms
Wife
Opened
Family
Knees
Walnut
Use
Insane
Walnuts

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I want to kiss God on His nose and watch Him sneeze and so do you. Not out of disrespect. Out of pique. Out of a man-to-man thing.
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I cannot walk an inch / without trying to walk to God.
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You must be a poet, a lady of evil luck desiring to be what you are not, longing to be what you can only visit.
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I am a collection of dismantled almosts.
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I grow old on my bitterness.
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Psychiatry is a dirty mirror.
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unless I can shake myself free of my dog, my flag, of my desk, my mind, I find life a bit of a drag. Not always, mind you. Usually I'm like my frying pan useful, graceful, sturdy and with no caper, no plan.
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The silence is death. It comes each day with its shock to sit on my shoulder, a white bird, and peck at the black eyes and the vibrating red muscle of my mouth.
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It would be pleasant to be drunk.
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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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It is in the small things we see it. The child's first step, as awesome as an earthquake. The first time you rode a bike, wallowing up the sidewalk.
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I, in my brand new body, which was not a woman's yet, told the stars my questions and thought God could really see the heat and the painted light, elbows, knees, dreams, goodnight.
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The windows, the starving windows that drive the trees like nails into my heart.
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If the doctors cure then the sun sees it. If the doctors kill then the earth hides it. The doctors should fear arrogance more than cardiac arrest.
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Yet love enters my blood like an I.V., dripping in its little white moments.
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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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You lay, a small knuckle on my white bed lay, that fist like a snail, small and strong at my breast. Your lips are animals you are fed with love. At first, hunger is not wrong.
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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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Rocks crumble, make new forms, oceans move the continents, mountains rise up and down like ghosts yet all is natural, all is change.
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Not that it was beautiful, but that, in the end, there was a certain sense of order there something worth learning in that narrow diary of my mind
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