Practice

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Anthony Wilson

Practice

To weep unbidden, to wake
at night in order to weep, to wait
for the whisker on the face of the clock
to twitch again, moving
the dumb day forward—

is this merely practice?
Some believe in heaven,
some in rest. We’ll float,
you said. Afterward
we’ll float between two worlds—

five bronze beetles
stacked like spoons in one
peony blossom, drugged by lust:
if I came back as a bird
I’d remember that—

until everyone we love
is safe is what you said.

Ellen Bryant Voigt, from Messenger: New and Selected Poems, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

The thing with poems that you know well is that after a while it is possible to stop being surprised by what is going in them. You forget what led you to them in the first place. That shock of the new, that transcendent Oh my gosh, you…

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