Quote

I tied down time with a rope but it came back. Then I put my head in a death bowl and my eyes shut up like clams. They didn't come back.

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
Like
Came
Eyes
Clams
Eye
Bowl
Death
Bowls
Didn
Rope
Back
Tied
Come
Shut
Time
Head

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Earth, earthriding your merry-go-roundtoward extinction,right to the rootsthickening the oceans like gravy,festering in your caves,you are becoming a latrine.
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Father, you died once, salted down at fifty-nine, packed down like a big snow angel, wasn't that enough?
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I suffer for birds and fireflies but not frogs, she said, and threw him across the room. Kaboom! Like a genie out of a samovar, a handsome prince arose in the corner of the bedroom.
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Poetry is my life, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face.
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For I could not read or speak and on the long nights I could not turn the moon off or count the lights of cars across the ceiling.
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Meanwhile in my head, I’m undergoing open-heart surgery.
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Yes, I know. Death sits with his key in my lock. Not one day is taken for granted. Even nursery rhymes have put me in hock.
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Suddenly I'm not half the girl I used to be. There's a shadow hanging over me . . . From me to you out of my electric devil.
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She is so naked and singular. She is the sum of yourself and your dream. Climb her like a monument, step after step. She is solid.
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this is no dream just my oily life where the people are alibis and the street is unfindable for an entire lifetime.
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Now that I have written many words, and let out so many loves, for so many, and been altogether what I always was a woman of excess, of zeal and greed, I find the effort useless.
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Writers are such phonies: they sometimes have wise insights but they don't live by them at all. That's what writers are like...you think they know something, but usually they are just messes.
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Someone is dead. Even the trees know it, those poor old dancers who come on lewdly, all pea-green scarfs and spine pole.
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I did not know the woman I would be nor that blood would bloom in me each month like an exotic flower, nor that children, two monuments, would break from between my legs.
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I am younger each year at the first snow.
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Poems aren't postcards to send home.
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Inside many of us is a small old man who wants to get out.
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Not that it was beautiful, but that I found some order there.
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My husband sings Baa Baa black sheep and we pretend that all's certain and good, that the marriage won't end.
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