Quote

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.

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
Eyes
Muscles
Eye
Shock
White
Shoulders
Black
Red
Comes
Mouth
Peck
Death
Mouths
Vibrating
Bird
Muscle
Silence
Shoulder

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Take a woman talking, purging herself with rhymes, drumming words out like a typewriter, planting words in you like grass seed. You'll move off.
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Nature is full of teeth that come in one by one, then decay, fall out.
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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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Love? Be it man. Be it woman. It must be a wave you want to glide in on, give your body to it, give your laugh to it, give, when the gravelly sand takes you, your tears to the land. To love another is something like prayer and can't be planned, you just fall into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.
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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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And within the house ashes are being stuffed into my marriage, fury is lapping the walls, dishes crack on the shelves, a strangler needs my throat, the daughter has ceased to eat anything.
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No one to hate except the slim fish of memory that slides in and out of my brain.
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As it has been said: Love and a cough cannot be concealed. Even a small cough. Even a small love.
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I am stuffing your mouth with your promises and watching you vomit them out upon my face.
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the marriage twists, holds firm, a sailor's knot.
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