Thursday, January 12, 2012

Eighteen Days Without You


"Then I think of you in bed,
your tongue half chocolate, half ocean,
of the houses that you swing into,
of the steel wool hair on your head,
of your persistent hands and then
how we gnaw at the barrier because we are two."

I recently came across this jarring and lovely poem "Eighteen Days Without You" by Anne Sexton. I would transcribe it here, but instead, there is a page that has displayed them so perfectly and where you can read the whole work Eighteen Days Without You Her raw "confessional poet" style is sometimes disturbing, tantalizing, sometimes haunting and then beautiful.

As her teacher Robert Lowell once said of Sexton, “her gift was to grip, to give words to the drama of her personality.”

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