Quote

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.

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
Free
Boredom
Desk
Find
Useful
Desks
Mind
Dog
Flag
Always
Plan
Flags
Caper
Life
Usually
Shake
Capers
Like
Plans
Contentment
Frying
Unless
Shakes
Sturdy
Bits
Drag
Graceful

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I would like to bury all the hating eyes under the sand somewhere.
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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.
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I am a collection of dismantled almosts.
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Meanwhile in my head, I’m undergoing open-heart surgery.
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Rocks crumble, make new forms, oceans move the continents, mountains rise up and down like ghosts yet all is natural, all is change.
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Every time I get happy the Nana-hex comes through. Birds turn into plumber's tools, a sonnet turns into a dirty joke, a wind turns into a tracheotomy, a boat turns into a corpse.
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The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.
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All who love have lied.
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It would be pleasant to be drunk.
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Oh sharp diamond, my mother! I could not count the cost of all your faces, your moods that present that I lost. Sweet girl, my deathbed, my jewel-fingered lady...
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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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... 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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I am torn in two but I will conquer myself.
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I’m lost. And it’s my own fault. It’s about time I figured out that I can’t ask people to keep me found.
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I think I've been writing black poems all along, wearing my white mask. I'm always the victim ... but no longer!
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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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When I lie down to love, old dwarf heart shakes her head. Like an imbecile she was born old.
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And what of the dead? They lie without shoes in the stone boats. They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.
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