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
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 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.
Thumbs grow into my throat. I wear slaps like a spot of rouge.
There is hope. There is hope everywhere. Today God give milk and I have the pail.
When they turn the sun on again I'll plant children under it, I'll light up my soul with a match and let it sing....
I'll vacuum up my stale hair, I'll pay all my neighbors' bad debts, I'll write a poem called Yellow and put my lips down to drink it up....
unless I can shake myself free of my dog, my flag, of my desk, my mind, I find life a bit of a drag. Not always, mind you. Usually I'm like my frying pan useful, graceful, sturdy and with no caper, no plan.
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....
stop the darkness and its amputations and find the real McCoy in the private holiness of my hands.
Dead drunk is the term I think of, insensible, neither cool nor warm, without a head or a foot. To be drunk is to be intimate with a fool.
Take the brown eyes of my father, those gun shots, those mean muds. Bury them. Take the blue eyes of my mother, naked as the sea....
O fallen angel, the companion within me, whisper something holy before you pinch me into the grave.
Loving me with my shoes off means loving my long brown legs, sweet dears, as good as spoons; and my feet, those two children let out to play naked.