Showing posts with label Anne Sexton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Anne Sexton. Show all posts

Friday, July 9, 2010

what the bird with the human head knew




I went to the bird
with the human head,
and asked,
Please Sir,
where is God?

God is too busy
to be here on earth,
His angels are like one thousand geese assembled
and always flapping.
But I can tell you where the well of God is.

Is it on earth?
I asked.
He replied,
Yes. It was dragged down
from paradise by one of the geese.

I walked many days,
past witches that eat grandmothers knitting booties
as if they were collecting a debt.
Then, in the middle of the desert
I found the well,
it bubbled up and down like a litter of cats
and there was water,
and I drank,
and there was water,
and I drank.

Then the well spoke to me.

It said: Abundance is scooped from abundance,
yet abundance remains.

Then I knew.







~ Anne Sexton
.
(Few established poets nowadays have a background as non-spectacular as that of Anne Sexton (1928-1974), a mediocre student who neither went to college nor formally studied literature. For a time she worked as a fashion model. Emotional, impetuous, she even eloped at the age of 19.
.
Anne Sexton began falling to pieces in her early 20’s after the births of her two daughters. Her psychiatrist recommended writing poetry as a form of therapy; she took to the typewriter at the age of 26 and never looked back.)


what's that


.
 
 
Before it came inside
I had watched it from my kitchen window,
watched it swell like a new balloon,
watched it slump and then divide,
like something I know I know —
a broken pear or two halves of the moon,
or round white plates floating nowhere
or fat hands waving in the summer air
until they fold together like a fist or a knee.
After that it came to my door. Now it lives here.
And of course: it is a soft sound, soft as a seal’s ear,
that was caught between a shape and a shape and then returned to me.
 
 
You know how parents call
from sweet beaches anywhere, come in come in
and how you sank under water to put out
the sound, or how one of them touched in the hall
at night: the rustle and the skin
you couldn’t know, but heard, the stout
slap of tides and the dog snoring. It’s here
now, caught back from time in my adult year —
the image we did forget: the crackling shells on our feet
or the swing of the spoon in soup. It is as real
as splinters stuck in your ear. The noise we steal
is half a bell. And outside cars whisk by on the suburban street
 
 
and are there and are true.
What else is this, this intricate shape of air?
calling me, calling you.
 
 
 
 
~ Anne Sexton
.

Friday, September 18, 2009

the kiss

...
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!
...
Before today my body was useless.
Now it's tearing at its square corners.
It's tearing old Mary's garments off, knot by knot
and see -- Now it's shot full of these electric bolts.
Zing! A resurrection!
...
Once it was a boat, quite wooden
and with no business, no salt water under it
and in need of some paint. It was no more
than a group of boards. But you hoisted her, rigged her.
She's been elected.
...
My nerves are turned on. I hear them like
musical instruments. Where there was silence
the drums, the strings are incurably playing. You did this.
Pure genius at work. Darling, the composer has stepped
into fire.
...
~ Anne Sexton