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Still, the novels and histories of madness couldn’t hold a candle—well, maybe Plath could—to stories of the Complete Nervous Breakdown I’d heard throughout childhood. My grandmother always had a story about somebody she knew who’d broken down.

I guess having a sister is about
more than just a body.

I think Hart wanted—he was nothing if not a man of magnificent and consuming desires—the wrong things, or things to which he was not quite entitled. I have wanted them too

never mind
the fickleness of the light
here, the damp that would

a more flimsily
rooted loveliness
drown.

For me, the restlessness leads to the next poem.

I dream myself the boy thrown
from the Jeep again: face, burlap

to hide what the boys made
with their fists.

A friend reminded me recently of joy—
my joy. My laugh, infectious, she said.

The hope is that by having attended to poets’ work wholeheartedly, we will come to see the world and those who move within it a little more clearly, so that we may love it, and one another, a little better and put that love into action.

Even a book is simple in this folded
World. Though my throne is hidden, the horn-shaped moon

somewhere someone is dying you remember but
see the ache and its grace in frantic flight