Anne Sexton

praying at last
for impossible loves, or new skin, or still
another child.

I burn the way money burns.

Father, I'm thirty-six,
yet I lie here in your crib.
I'm getting born again, Adam,
as you prod me with your rib.

So far the continents stay on the map
but there is always a new method.

I am, each day,
typing out the God
my typewriter believes in.
Very quick. Very intense,
like a wolf at a live heart.

My business is words. Words are like labels,
or coins, or better, like swarming bees.

Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself

Anne and Kayo, spring 1968

"Do you know that you are the father that never loved me, the lover who made me a woman, the friend who taught me how to enjoy life, the brother to share laughter with, the son I'd like to have. Do you know?"

-From a letter to Alfred "Kayo" Sexton, Sept. 27th, 1963

The town does not exist
except where one black-haired tree slips
up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.
The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die.

All night dark wings flopping in my heart. Each an ambition bird.

~Anne Sexton, The Ambition Bird

Live or die, but don't poison everything . . .

Having come this far
I will go farther.

Turn, my hungers!
For once make a deliberate decision.

"The vein I'm still tapping is so inward that I dare not bring forth poems . . . that my ambition to write good poems is going to stop me from daring to write bad ones."

-From a letter to Brother Dennis Farrell, Dec. 26th, 1962

Jesus saw the multitudes were hungry
and He said, Oh Lord,
send down a short-order cook.
And the Lord said, Abracadabra.

Although there are chairs
I lie on the floor.

🎄 Christmas, 1952 🎄

"Am pregnant - a little - with Linda!"

La la la, Oh music swims back to me
and I can feel the tune they played
the night they left me
in this private institution on a hill.

Live or die, but don't poison everything . . .

Today an interne knocks my knees,
testing for reflexes.
Once I would have winked and begged for dope.
Today I am terribly patient.
Today crows play black-jack
on the stethoscope.

Closer and closer
comes the hour of my death
as I rearrange my face, grow back,
grow undeveloped and straight-haired.
All this is death.

She is so naked and singular.
She is the sum of yourself and your dream.
Climb her like a monument, step after step.
She is solid.

As for me, I am watercolor.
I wash off.

c. 1946-1948

This is beautiful.

I am surprised to see that the ocean is still going on.

"When I read your poem, that first time, leafing through the anthology, it walked out at me and grew like a bone inside of my heart."

-Anne Sexton in a letter to W.D. Snodgrass about his poem "Hearts Needle."

True. There is
a beautiful Jesus.
He is frozen to his bones like a chunk of beef.
How desperately he wanted to pull his arms in!
How desperately I touch his vertical and horizontal axes!
But I can't. Need is not quite belief.

Thank you; I'm honored.

Anne Sexton domesticates my terror, examines it and describes it, teaches it some tricks which will amuse me, then lets it gallop wild in my forest once more.

-Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

"Como ha sido dicho:
El amor y la tos
No pueden ser ocultados.
Ni siquiera una pequeña tos.
Ni siquiera un pequeño amor".

“As it has been said:
Love and a cough
cannot be concealed.
Even a small cough.
Even a small love.”

― Anne Sexton