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I would sell my life to avoid the pain that begins in the crib with its bars or perhaps with your first breath when the planets drill your future into you.

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
Life
Avoid
Drill
Planets
Drills
Perhaps
Bars
Future
Sell
Pain
Breath
Firsts
Breaths
First
Sells
Would
Begins
Crib

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Then all this became history. Your hand found mine. Life rushed to my fingers like a blood clot. Oh, my carpenter, the fingers are rebuilt. They dance with yours.
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I have forgiven all the old actors for dying. A new one comes on with the same lines, like large white growths, in his mouth. The dancers come on from the wings, perfectly mated.
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Sometimes I fly like an eagle but with the wings of a wren
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There is joy in all: in the hair I brush each morning, in the Cannon towel, newly washed, that I rub my body with each morning.
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women are born twice.
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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 am younger each year at the first snow. When I see it, suddenly, in the air, all little and white and moving then I am in love again and very young and I believe everything.
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The stars are pears that no one can reach, even for a wedding. Perhaps for a death.
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I will be steel! I will build a steel bridge over my need! I will build a bomb shelter over my heart! But my future is a secret. It is as shy as a mole.
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Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.
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Even so, I must admire your skill. You are so gracefully insane.
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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.
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I am tearing the feathers out of the pillows, waiting, waiting for Daddy to come home and stuff me so full of our infected child that I turn invisible, but married, at last.
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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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Jewels! Today each twig is important, each ring, each infection, each form is all that the gods must have meant.
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Blind with love, my daughter has cried nightly for horses, those long-necked marchers and churners that she has mastered, any and all, reigning them in like a circus hand.
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God has a brown voice, as soft and full as beer.
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Loving me with my shoes off means loving my long brown legs, sweet dears, as good as spoons and my feet, those two children let out to play naked.
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... and my love stays bitterly glowing, spasms of it will not sleep, and I am helpless and thirsty and need shade but there is no one to cover me- not even God.
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Rejoice with the day lily for it is born for a day to live by the mailbox and glorify the roadside
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