Winter Colony
Stylishly, in the white season,
we come here wearing awkward logs
on our feet, to skate on icebergs,
to ride pulleys into the sky
and ride the sky down.
We ride the sky down,
our voices falling back behind us,
unraveling like smooth threads.
Say, I am the air I break; or say,
I am a spool unwinding.
I am the spool that unwound
while riding the sky down, that waits
now to ride the pulley back into the sky,
that comes here, stylishly,
each weekend, for the same trick
in the white season.
From The Christian Science Monitor, February 12, 1959. Copyright © 1959 Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.
Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton was born Anne Gray Harvey in Newton, Massachusetts, on November 9, 1928. She received the 1967 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her third collection, Live or Die (Houghton Mifflin, 1966). She taught at Boston University and at Colgate University, and died on October 4, 1974, in Weston, Massachusetts.