Anne Sexton Poems

The summer sun ray
shifts through a suspicious tree.
though I walk through the valley of the shadow
...

'Do you like me?'
I asked the blue blazer.
No answer.
Silence bounced out of his books.
...

Many are the deceivers:
The suburban matron,
proper in the supermarket,
list in hand so she won't suddenly fly,
...

There was an unwanted child.
Aborted by three modern methods
she hung on to the womb,
...

Because there was no other place
to flee to,
I came back to the scene of the disordered senses,
...

Some women marry houses.
It's another kind of skin; it has a heart,
...

The town does not exist
except where one black-haired tree slips
up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.
...

Inside many of us
is a small old man
who wants to get out.
No bigger than a two-year-old
...

The end of the affair is always death.
She's my workshop. Slippery eye,
out of the tribe of myself my breath
...

Just once I knew what life was for.
In Boston, quite suddenly, I understood;
walked there along the Charles River,
...