Quote

My safe, safe psychosis is broken. It was hard. It was made of stone. It covered my face like a mask. But it has cracked.

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
Like
Stone
Stones
Safe
Broken
Psychosis
Face
Cracked
Faces
Revelations
Hard
Mask
Made
Covered

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Being kissed on the back of the knee is a moth at the windowscreen.
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To tell the truth days are all the same size and words aren't much company.
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My husband sings Baa Baa black sheep and we pretend that all's certain and good, that the marriage won't end.
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Take your foot out of the graveyard, they are busy being dead.
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There is a good look that I wear like a blood clot. I have sewn it over my left breast. I have made a vocation of it.
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When someone kisses someone or flushes the toilet it is my other who sits in a ball and cries. My other beats a tin drum in my heart. My other hangs up laundry as I try to sleep. My other cries and cries and cries when I put on a cocktail dress.
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I'm the crazy one who thinks that words reach people.
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The family story tells, and it was told true, of my great-grandfather who begat eight genius children and bought twelve almost new grand pianos. He left a considerable estate when he died.
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Pulling off the fat diamond engagement ring, pulling off the elopement wedding ring, and holding them, clicking them in thumb and forefinger, the indent of twenty-five years, like a tiny rip leaving its mark.
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So I won't hang around in my hospital shift, repeating The Black Mass and all of it. I say Live, Live because of the sun, the dream, the excitable gift.
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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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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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Even so, I must admire your skill. You are so gracefully insane.
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We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb. Sucking on it!
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I try to take care and be gentle to them. Words and eggs must be handled with care. Once broken they are impossible things to repair.
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My sleeping pill is white. It is a splendid pearl it floats me out of myself, my stung skin as alien as a loose bolt of cloth.
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Maybe, although my heart is a kitten of butter, I am blowing it up like a zeppelin.
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Sometimes the soul takes pictures of things it has wished for, but never seen.
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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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I like you your eyes are full of language. [Letter to Anne Clarke, July 3, 1964.]
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