Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton
Anne Sextonwas an American poet, known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for her book Live or Die. Themes of her poetry include her long battle against depression and mania, suicidal tendencies, and various intimate details from her private life, including her relationships with her husband and children...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth9 November 1928
CityNewton, MA
CountryUnited States of America
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.
O yellow eye, let me be sick with your heat, let me be feverish and frowning.
The summer has seized you, as when, last month in Amalfi, I saw lemons as large as your desk-side globe-that miniature map of the world-and I could mention, too, the market stalls of mushrooms and garlic bugs all engorged. Or I even think of the orchard next door, where the berries are done and the apples are beginning to swell. And once, with our first backyard,I remember I planted an acre of yellow beans we couldn't eat.
I am in my own mind. I am locked in the wrong house.
And the aura of you remains, remains, remains…
I've grown tired of love You are the trouble with me I watch you walk right by
For I could not read or speak and on the long nights I could not turn the moon off or count the lights of cars across the ceiling.
Oh, darling, let your body in, let it tie you in, in comfort.
I have been cut in two.
Talk to me about sadness. I talk about it too much in my own head but I never mind others talking about it either; I occasionally feel like I tremendously need others to talk about it as well.
I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year’s cupful and downward into a decade’s quart and downward into a lifetime’s ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman’s float.
Suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build.
I tell you what you’ll never really know: all the medical hypothesis that explained my brain will never be as true as these struck leaves letting go.
You who have inhabited me in the deepest and most broken place, are going, going