posts tagged "Anne Sexton"

"In this place everyone talks to his own mouth.
That’s what it means to be crazy.
Those I loved best died of it -
the fool’s disease.”
Anne Sexton, from “Flee On Your Donkey"

"And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in their stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.”
-Anne Sexton, from “The Truth the Dead Know"

Oh mother of sex,
lady of the staggering cuddle,
where do these hands come from?
A man, a Moby Dick of a man,
a swimmer going up and down in his brain,
the gentleness of wine in his fingertips,
where do these hands come from?
I was born a glass baby and nobody picked me up
except to wash the dust off me.
He has picked me up and licked me alive.

Hands
growing like ivy over me,
hands growing out of me like hair,
yet turning into fire grass,
planting an iris in my mouth,
spinning and blue,
the nipples turning into wings,
the lips turning into days that would not give birth,
days that would not hold us in their house,
days that would not wrap us in their secret lap,
and yet hands, hands growing out of pictures,
hands crawling out of walls,
hands that excite oblivion,
like a wind,
a strange wind
from somewhere tropic
making a storm between my blind legs,
letting me lift the mask of the child from my face,
while all the toy villages fall
and I sink softly into
the heartland.

-Anne Sexton, “When The Glass Of My Body Broke”

psychotherapy: Consorting with Angels:  A tribute to the life and work of American poet Anne Sexton (BBC Radio 4) Featuring poetry, home video archive and dramatised transcripts of audio tapes recorded during Sexton’s psychotherapy sessions. Anne’s daughters Linda and Joyce remember their mother, and her close friend JD McClatchy and former psychiatric nurse and poet Anne Rouse share their thoughts on a truly remarkable woman.

"My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely.”
-Anne Sexton, from “The Truth the Dead Know"

"I cannot promise very much. I give you the images I know. Lie still with me and watch. We laugh and we touch. I promise you love.  Time will not take that away.”

          —Anne Sexton 

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"by all the words in my hands and the sea that bangs in my throat.”
-Anne Sexton, “The Room of My Life"

"I live in,
my life,
and its hauled up
notebooks.

-Anne Sexton, from “45 Mercy Street"

To love another is something
like prayer and it can’t be planned, you just fall
into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.

- from Admonitions to a Special Person, Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton sometimes seemed like a woman without skin. She felt everything so intensely, had so little capacity to filter out pain that everyday events often seemed unbearable to her. Paradoxically it is also that skinlessness which makes a poet. One must have the gift of language, but even a great gift is useless without the other curse: the eyes that see so sharply they often want to close. - Erica Jong