Quote

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.

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
Four
Fish
Chilly
Persons
Fishes
Fingernails
Person
Grass
Alongside
Come
Cross
Eyed
Must
Crosses
Plunge
Green
Leafs
Meet
Ants
Clover
Magic
Leaf
Clovers

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I am so imperfect, can you love me when really my soul is deformed? Will you love me anyhow?
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What a lay me down this is with two pink, two orange, two green, two white goodnights.
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The tongue, the Chinese say, is like a sharp knife: it kills without drawing blood.
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Once I was a couple. I was my own king and queen with cheese and bread and rosé on the rocks of Rockport.
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The little girl skipped by under the wrinkled oak leaves and held fast to a replica of herself.
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Home is my Bethlehem, my succoring shelter, my mental hospital, my wife, my dam, my husband, my sir, my womb, my skull.
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The Saints come, as human as a mouth, with a bag of God in their backs, like a hunchback, they come, they come marching in.
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Yesterday I did not want to be borrowed but this is the typewriter that sits before me and love is where yesterday is at.
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Please God, we're all right here. Please leave us alone. Don't send death in his fat red suit and his ho-ho baritone.
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Man is a bird full of mud, I say aloud. And death looks on with a casual eye and scratches his anus.
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In a letter (no matter how quickly it is written or honestly or freely or lovingly) it is more possible to be loving and lovable, more possible to reach out and to take in ... I feel I have somehow deceived you into thinking this is really a human relationship. It is a letter relationship between humans.
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I said, the poets are there I hear them singing and lying around their round table and around me still.
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I was the girl of the chain letter, the girl full of talk of coffins and keyholes, the one of the telephone bills, the wrinkled photo and the lost connections.
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My heart is on a budget. It keeps me on the brink.
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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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In an old time there was a king as wise as a dictionary.
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It was as if a morning-glory had bloomed in her throat, and all that blue and small pollen ate into my heart, violent and religious
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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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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.
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I can only sign over everything, the house, the dog, the ladders, the jewels, the soul, the family tree, the mailbox. Then I can sleep. Maybe.
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