Quote

The sky breaks. It sags and breathes upon my face. in the presence of mine enemies, mine enemies The world is full of enemies. There is no safe place.

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
Full
Breaks
Enemy
Enemies
Break
Presence
Face
Breathe
Faces
Sky
Upon
Mines
Place
Mine
World
Safe
Breathes

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I have forgiven all the old actors for dying. A new one comes on with the same lines, like large white growths, in his mouth. The dancers come on from the wings, perfectly mated.
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Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.
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All I am is the trick of words writing themselves.
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Today is made of yesterday, each time I steal toward rites I do not know, waiting for the lost ingredient, as if salt or money or even lust would keep us calm and prove us whole at last.
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you see, we live in a cold climate and are not permitted to kiss on the street so I made up a song that wasn't true. I made up a song called Marriage.
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Somebody who should have been born is gone.
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I raise my pelvis to God so that it may know the truth of how flowers smash through the long winter.
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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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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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Sometimes I fly like an eagle but with the wings of a wren
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I'm hunting for the truth. It might be a kind of poetic truth, and not just a factual one, because behind everything that happens to you, there is another truth, a secret life.
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I think of myself as writing for one person, that one perfect reader who understands and loves.
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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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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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I am younger each year at the first snow.
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Big heart, wide as a watermelon, but wise as birth, there is so much abundance in the people I have.
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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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There is no word for time. Today we will not think to number another summer or watch its white bird into the ground.
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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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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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