Quote

But even in a telephone booth evil can seep out of the receiver and we must cover it with a mattress, and then tear it from its roots and bury it, bury it.

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
Telephones
Tear
Seep
Cover
Mattress
Roots
Mattresses
Tears
Booth
Evil
Receiver
Must
Bury
Even
Telephone

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This is what poems are: with mercy for the greedy, they are the tongue's wrangle, the world's pottage, the rat's star.
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Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house, marvelous elation. It’s as though I could fly.
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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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Need is not quite belief.
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Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.
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All in all, I'd say, the world is strangling.
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Put your mouthful of words away and come with me to watch the lilies open in such a field, growing there like yachts, slowly steering their petals without nurses or clocks.
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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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Yes I try to kill myself in small amounts, an innocuous occupation. Actually I'm hung up on it.
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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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Emerald as heavy as a golf course, ruby as dark as an afterbirth, diamond as white as sun on the sea.
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I am not lazy. I am on the amphetamine of the soul. I am, each day, typing out the God my typewriter believes in.
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It is June. I am tired of being brave.
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My death from the wrists, two name tags, blood worn like a corsage to bloom one on the left and one on the right.
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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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Now, in my middle age, about nineteen in the head I'd say, I am rowing, I am rowing.
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I am teaching... This year it's kind of like having a love affair with a rhinoceros.
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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 brush my hair, waiting in the pain machine for my bones to get hard, for the soft, soft bones that were laid apart and were screwed together. They will knit. And the other corpse, the fractured heart, I feed it piecemeal, little chalice. I'm good to it.
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