a poem

The Dead Heart

After I wrote this, a friend scrawled on this page, “Yes.” 

And I said, merely to myself, “I wish it could be for a 
different seizure—as with Molly Bloom and her ‘and 
yes I said yes I will Yes.'

It is not a turtle 
hiding in its little green shell. 
It is not a stone 
to pick up and put under your black wing. 
It is not a subway car that is obsolete. 
It is not a lump of coal that you could light. 
It is a dead heart. 
It is inside of me. 
It is a stranger 
yet once it was agreeable, 
opening and closing like a clam. 

What it has cost me you can’t imagine, 
shrinks, priests, lovers, children, husbands, 
friends and all the lot. 
An expensive thing it was to keep going. 
It gave back too. 
Don’t deny it! 
I half wonder if April would bring it back to life? 
A tulip? The first bud? 
But those are just musings on my part, 
the pity one has when one looks at a cadaver. 

How did it die? 
I called it EVIL. 
I said to it, your poems stink like vomit. 
I didn’t stay to hear the last sentence. 
It died on the word EVIL. 
It did it with my tongue. 
The tongue, the Chinese say, 
is like a sharp knife: 
it kills 
without drawing blood. 

Anne Sexton

The Inventory of Goodbye

The Inventory Of Goodbye by Anne Sexton


I have a pack of letters,
I have a pack of memories.
I could cut out the eyes of both.
I could wear them like a patchwork apron.
I could stick them in the washer, the drier,
and maybe some of the pain would float off like dirt?
Perhaps down the disposal I could grind up the loss.
Besides -- what a bargain -- no expensive phone calls.
No lengthy trips on planes in the fog.
No manicky laughter or blessing from an odd-lot priest.
That priest is probably still floating on a fog pillow.
Blessing us. Blessing us.

Am I to bless the lost you,
sitting here with my clumsy soul?
Propaganda time is over.
I sit here on the spike of truth.
No one to hate except the slim fish of memory
that slides in and out of my brain.
No one to hate except the acute feel of my nightgown
brushing my body like a light that has gone out.
It recalls the kiss we invented, tongues like poems,
meeting, returning, inviting, causing a fever of need.
Laughter, maps, cassettes, touch singing its path -
all to be broken and laid away in a tight strongbox.
The monotonous dead clog me up and there is only
black done in black that oozes from the strongbox.
I must disembowel it and then set the heart, the legs,
of two who were one upon a large woodpile
and ignite, as I was once ignited, and let it whirl
into flame, reaching the sky
making it dangerous with its red.

Photograph by Sarah Moon


Anne Sexton (1928 - 1974) - Poet

photo by, Rollie McKenna


Admonitions to a Special Person

Watch out for power, for its avalanche can bury you, snow, snow, snow, smothering your mountain.
Watch out for hate, it can open its mouth and you’ll fling yourself out to eat off your leg, an instant leper.
Watch out for friends, because when you betray them, as you will, they will bury their heads in the toilet and flush themselves away. Watch out for intellect, because it knows so much it knows nothing and leaves you hanging upside down, mouthing knowledge as your heart falls out of your mouth. Watch out for games, the actor’s part, the speech planned, known, given, for they will give you away and you will stand like a naked little boy, pissing on your own child-bed. Watch out for love (unless it is true, and every part of you says yes including the toes), it will wrap you up like a mummy, and your scream won’t be heard and none of your running will end. Love? Be it man. Be it woman. It must be a wave you want to glide in on, give your body to it, give your laugh to it, give, when the gravelly sand takes you, your tears to the land. To love another is something like prayer and can’t be planned, you just fall into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief. Special person, if I were you I’d pay no attention to admonitions from me, made somewhat out of your words and somewhat out of mine. A collaboration. I do not believe a word I have said, except some, except I think of you like a young tree with pasted-on leaves and know you’ll root and the real green thing will come. Let go. Let go. Oh special person, possible leaves, this typewriter likes you on the way to them, but wants to break crystal glasses in celebration, for you, when the dark crust is thrown off and you float all around like a happened balloon.
-- Anne Sexton

The Starry Night



The Starry Night

by Anne Sexton


That does not keep me from having a terrible need of—shall I say the word—religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars.Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his brother
The town does not exist
except where one black-haired tree slips
up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.
The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.   
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die.


It moves. They are all alive.
Even the moon bulges in its orange irons   
to push children, like a god, from its eye.
The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars.   
Oh starry starry night! This is how   
I want to die:

into that rushing beast of the night,   
sucked up by that great dragon, to split   
from my life with no flag,
no belly,
no cry.

Her Kind

"have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind."

Anne Sexton


Photography by Deborah Turbeville.