Anne Sexton (1928 – 1974)
Born Anne Gray Harvey, was an American poet and writer.
I rot on the wall, my own
Dorian Gray.
Love your self's self where it lives.
There is no special God to refer to; or if there is,
why did I let you grow
in another place. You did not know my voice
when I came back to call. All the superlatives
of tomorrow's white tree and mistletoe
will not help you know the holidays you had to miss.
There is rust in my mouth,
the stain of an old kiss.
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.
My mouth blooms like a cut.
I've been wronged all year, tedious
nights, nothing but rough elbows in them
and delicate boxes of Kleenex calling crybaby
crybaby, you fool!
Earth, earth
riding your merry-go-round
toward extinction,
right to the roots
thickening the oceans like gravy,
festering in your caves,
you are becoming a latrine.
I am alive when your fingers are.
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.
God is only mocked by believers.
Death,
I need my little addiction to you.
need that tiny voice who,
even as I rise from the sea,
all woman, all there,
says kill me, kill me.
We are all writing God's poem.
Even so, I must admire your skill.
You are so gracefully insane.
You said the anger would come back
just as the love did.
I was spread out daily
and examined for flaws.
I begin again, Dr.Y,
this neverland journal,
full of my own sense of filth.
Why else keep a journal, if not
to examine your own filth?
Catch me. I'm your disease.
Blue eyes wash off sometimes.
A woman who writes feels too much,
those trances and portents!
As if cycles and children and islands
weren't enough; as if mourners and gossips
and vegetables were never enough.
She thinks she can warm the stars.
A writer is essentially a spy.
Dear love, I am that girl.
I imitate
a memory of belief
that I do not own.
I grow old on my bitterness.