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
I love the word warm. It is almost unbearable-- so moist and breathlike.
Jewels! Today each twig is important, each ring, each infection, each form is all that the gods must have meant.
To die whole, riddled with nothing but desire for it, is like breakfast after love.
Once I was a couple. I was my own king and queen with cheese and bread and rosé on the rocks of Rockport.
I am torn in two but I will conquer myself.
I sit at my desk each night with no place to go, opening the wrinkled maps of Milwaukee and Buffalo, the whole U.S., its cemeteries, its arbitrary time zones, through routes like small veins, capitals like small stones.
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.
Despite my asbestos gloves, the cough is filling me with black, and a red powder seeps through my veins....
Father, you died once, salted down at fifty-nine, packed down like a big snow angel, wasn't that enough?
Come, my pretender, my fritter, my bubbler, my chicken biddy! Oh succulent one, it is but one turn in the road and I would be a cannibal!
I remember the stink of the liverwurst. How I was put on a platter and laid between the mayonnaise and the bacon. The rhythm of the refrigerator had been disturbed.
I will be steel! I will build a steel bridge over my need! I will build a bomb shelter over my heart! But my future is a secret. It is as shy as a mole.
think of innocent Icarus who is doing quite well: larger than a sail, over the fog and the blast of the plushy ocean, he goes. Admire his wings!
Then God spoke to me and said: People say only good things about Christmas. If they want to say something bad, they whisper.