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

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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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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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Oh, darling, let your body in, let it tie you in, in comfort.
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Look to your heart that flutters in and out like a moth. God is not indifferent to your need. You have a thousand prayers but God has one.
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To die whole, riddled with nothing but desire for it, is like breakfast after love.
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The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.
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But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build. Twice I have so simply declared myself, have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy, have taken on his craft, his magic.
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You who have inhabited me in the deepest and most broken place, are going, going
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Now, in my middle age, about nineteen in the head I'd say, I am rowing, I am rowing.
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Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.
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Every time I get happy the Nana-hex comes through. Birds turn into plumber's tools, a sonnet turns into a dirty joke, a wind turns into a tracheotomy, a boat turns into a corpse.
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it was my first doll that water went into and water came out of much earlier it was the diaper I wore and the dirt thereof and my mother hating me for it
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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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Craft is a trick you make up to let you write the poem.
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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 am alone here in my own mind. There is no map and there is no road. It is one of a kind just as yours is.
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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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One of my secret instructions to myself as a poet is Whatever you do, don't be boring.
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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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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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