We all flicker. For just a moment, we have moved inside the poem.

I’m chopping onions for dinner when a professor on a podcast describes a medieval statue of the Virgin Mary whose miraculous tears were, in fact, generated by the movements of fish swimming around in a chamber of water hidden inside her head. The chamber was filled nearly to the brim, so that if a few fish had a moment of simultaneous vigor, the

A white vet’s image floats closer to me, then his pale eyes look through mine. I’m a window. He’s lost his right arm inside the stone. In the black mirror a woman’s trying to erase names: No, she’s brushing a boy’s hair.

the good thing about crying is you don’t really have to pick a subject.

Writing a poem is not so very different from digging a hole. It is work. You try to learn what you can from other holes and the people who dug before you. The difficulty comes from people who do not dig or spend time in holes thinking that the holes ought not to be so wet, or dark, or full of worms. “Why is your hole not lined with light?” Sir, it

But no, Dokli goes on to explain that she and the people she works and weeps alongside are all widows. Their tears are not mere examples of form; they are lines of grief carried over onto a new page.

I wonder whether men kill to create an occasion for the grief they already feel. I learned the other day that water freezes around that which is not water, that it requires a molecule of difference to remember how to form ice, that each snowflake very likely takes shape around a bacterium.129 An occasion.

What if I could hear among the songs of grief a refrain of sweetness too?

I do not want to cry. I want to be a poet. I want to look at the words with a dry and unswollen face.