Said the Poet to the Analyst

From the Selected Poems of Anne Sexton
Houghton Mifflin, Harcourt, 2000

Said the Poet to the Analyst

My business is words. Words are like labels, 
or coins, or better, like swarming bees. 
I confess I am only broken by the sources of things; 
as if words were counted like dead bees in the attic, 
unbuckled from their yellow eyes and their dry wings. 
I must always forget who one words is able to pick 
out another, to manner another, until I have got 
somethhing I might have said... 
but did not. 
Your business is watching my words. But I 
admit nothing. I work with my best, for instances, 
when I can write my praise for a nickel machine, 
that one night in Nevada: telling how the magic jackpot 
came clacking three bells out, over the lucky screen. 
But if you should say this is something it is not, 
then I grow weak, remembering how my hands felt funny 
and ridiculous and crowded with all 
the believing money.