Anne Sexton Quotes

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 a watercolor.
I wash off.

(For My Lover, Returning To His Wife)

THE FORTRESS

Under the pink quilted covers
I hold the pulse that counts your blood.
I think the woods outdoors
are half asleep,
left over from summer
like a stack of books after a flood,
left over like those promises I never keep.
On the right, the scrub pine tree
waits like a fruit store
holding up bunches of tufted broccoli.

We watch the wind from our square bed.
I press down my index finger — half in jest, half in dread — on the brown mole
under your left eye, inherited
from my right cheek: a spot of danger
where a bewitched worm ate its way through our soul
in search of beauty. My child, since July
the leaves have been fed
secretly from a pool of beet-red dye.

And sometimes they are battle green
with trunks as wet as hunters' boots,
smacked hard by the wind, clean
as oilskins. No,
the wind's not off the ocean.
Yes, it cried in your room like a wolf
and your pony tail hurt you. That was a long time ago.
The wind rolled the tide like a dying
woman. She wouldn't sleep,
she rolled there all night, grunting and sighing.

Darling, life is not in my hands;
life with its terrible changes
will take you, bombs or glands,
your own child at
your breast, your own house on your own land.
Outside the bittersweet turns orange.
Before she died, my mother and I picked those fat
branches, finding orange nipples
on the gray wire strands.
We weeded the forest, curing trees like cripples.

Your feet thump-thump against my back
and you whisper to yourself. Child,
what are you wishing? What pact
are you making?
What mouse runs between your eyes? What ark
can I fill for you when the world goes wild?
The woods are underwater, their weeds are shaking
in the tide; birches like zebra fish
flash by in a pack.
Child, I cannot promise that you will get your wish.

I cannot promise very much.
I give you the images I know.
Lie still with me and watch.
A pheasant moves
by like a seal, pulled through the mulch
by his thick white collar. He's on show
like a clown. He drags a beige feather that h

"Going Gone

Over stone walls and barns,
miles from the black-eyed Susans,
over circus tents and moon rockets
you are going, going.
You who have inhabited me
in the deepest and most broken place,
are going, going.
An old woman calls up to you
from her deathbed deep in sores,
asking, "What do you keep of her?"
She is the crone in the fables.
She is the fool at the supper
and you, sir, are the traveler.
Although you are in a hurry
you stop to open a small basket
and under layers of petticoats
you show her the tiger-striped eyes
that you have lately plucked,
you show her specialty, the lips,
those two small bundles,
you show her the two hands
that grip her fiercely,
one being mine, one being yours.
Torn right off at the wrist bone
when you started in your
impossible going, gone.
Then you place the basket
in the old woman's hollow lap
and as a last act she fondles
these artifacts like a child's head
and murmurs, "Precious. Precious."
And you are glad you have given
them to this one for she too
is making a trip."

And I say to myself that the trouble with life is that people are strangers.

I am torn in two
but I will conquer myself.
I will dig up the pride.
I will take scissors
and cut out the beggar.
I will take a crowbar
and pry out the broken
pieces of God in me.
Just like a jigsaw puzzle,
I will put Him together again
with the patience of a chess player.

How many pieces?

It feels like thousands,
God dressed up like a whore
in a slime of green algae.
God dressed up like an old man
staggering out of His shoes.
God dressed up like a child,
all naked,
even without skin,
soft as an avocado when you peel it.
And others, others, others.

But I will conquer them all
and build a whole nation of God
in me - but united,
build a new soul,
dress it with skin
and then put on my shirt
and sing an anthem,
a song of myself.

I don’t care, I love you anyhow. It is too late to turn you out of my heart. Part of you lives here.

Darling, the composer has stepped into fire.

I want to calm down, to rest, to outlive this nonsense.

"أتحبني؟"

سألتُ سترته الزرقاء.
لا جواب.
كان الصمت ينهمر من دفاتره.
ثم سقط من لسانه
وجاء وجلس بيننا
وخنق حلقي
وذبح يقيني
مزّق السجائر في فمي.
تبادلنا كلمات عمياء
ولم أبك،
ولم أتوسّل،
تنفّست الظلمة في قلبي،
وذلك الهواء الذي كان جميلًا
تحول إلى فرن غاز.

أتحبني؟
يا للعبث!
أي سؤال هو هذا؟
أي صمت هو هذا؟
ولمَ أمكث هنا
محاولة تفسير صمته؟

For God was as large as a sunlamp and laughed his heat at us and therefore we did not cringe at the death hole.

Alone in our place I was a guest.

ركوب المصعد باتجاه السماء
ــــــــــــــــــــ
كما قال الاطفائي:
لا تحجز غرفة في الطابق الخامس
في أي فندق في نيويورك.
إن فيها سلالم تصل إلى أعلى من ذلك
ولكن لن يتسلقها أحد.
كما قالت صحيفة نيويورك تايمز:
المصعد دائما يبحث
عن طابق الحريق
وينفتح آليا
ولن ينغلق.
ها هي التحذيرات
التي عليك أن تنساها
إن كنت تتسلق خارجا من ذاتك
إن كنت ستنطلق بقوة باتجاه السماء.

مرات عدة تجاوزتُ
الطابقَ الخامس
أتلوّى صاعدا
إلا إنني لم أصل إلى هناك
إلا مرة واحدة.
الطابق الستون:
نبتات صغيرة وبجعات
تنعطف متجهة إلى قبرها.
الطابق المائتان:
جبال صبرها صبر قطة،
صمت يرتدي حذاءه الخفيف.
الطابق الخمسمائة:
رسائلُ وخطابات عمرها قرون،
طيورٌ تشرب
مطبخٌ من سُحُب.
الطابقُ الستة آلاف:
النجومُ،
هياكلُ عظمية تشتعل فيها النيران،
أذرعُها تغني.
ومفتاح،
مفتاح كبير جدا،
يفتح شيئا –
في مكان ما –
هناك فوق.

Am I to bless the lost you,
sitting here with my clumsy soul?

And we are magic talking to itself,
noisy and alone. I am queen of all my sins
forgotten. Am I still lost?
Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself,
counting this row and that row of moccasins
waiting on the silent shelf.

I want to sleep all day and night (i.e., not live but not quite die) …