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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.

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
Marriage
Shelves
Wall
Dishes
Within
Ashes
House
Cracks
Lapping
Anything
Walls
Stuffed
Needs
Throat
Ceased
Divorce
Fury
Daughter
Crack

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we do not explain my husband's insane abuse and we do not say why your wild-haired wife has fled or that my father opened like a walnut and then was dead. Your palms fold over me like knees. Love is the only use.
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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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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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I imitatea memory of beliefthat I do not own.
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And we are magic talking to itself, noisy and alone. I am queen of all my sins forgotten. Am I still lost? Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself
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I have a black look I do not like. It is a mask I try on. I migrate toward it and its frog sits on my lips and defecates.
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God is only mocked by believers.
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Let there be a heaven so that man may outlive his grasses.
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Poems aren't postcards to send home.
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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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I hoard books. They are people who do not leave.
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Not that it was beautiful, but that, in the end, there was a certain sense of order there something worth learning in that narrow diary of my mind
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In an old time there was a king as wise as a dictionary.
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And if I tried to give you something else, something outside myself, you would not know that the worst of anyone can be, finally, an accident of hope
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It is June. I am tired of being brave.
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Suddenly I'm not half the girl I used to be. There's a shadow hanging over me . . . From me to you out of my electric devil.
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Don’t worry if they say you’re crazy. They said that about me and yet I was saner than all of them. I knew. No matter. You know. Insane or sane, you know. It’s a good thing to know - no matter what they call it.
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And thus Snow White became the prince's bride. The wicked queen was invited to the wedding feast and when she arrived there were red-hot iron shoes, in the manner of red-hot roller skates, clamped upon her feet.
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The ground has on its clothes. The trees poke out of sheets and each branch wears the sock of God.
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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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