Ashley Hay

There__ some comfort in seeing things go on; birds keep singing, buses keep running. But if you want those things to continue, perhaps you have to accept that the other kinds of things, unhappier, even horrific ones, will continue too. And that__ harder.

Such fascinating things, libraries. She closes her eyes. She couldwalk inside and step into a murder, a love story, a complete accountof somebody else__ life, or mutiny on the high seas. Such potential;such adventure__here__ a shimmer of malfeasance in trying otherways of being.

---Sleeps through the washes of the morning's colors and the warm brilliance of sunrise. She sleeps in a world where she remembers, perfectly, every detail about her husband, this day, that sentence, another touch. She will remember it all in the deepest sleep, and lose it again the moment her eyes open and she wonders how late it must be for the sun to already be so high and then remembers, in the next instant, what happened the day before.

How would you start to write a poem? How would you put together a series of words for its first line__ow would you know which words to choose? When you read a poem, every word seemed so perfect that it had to have been predestined__ell, a good poem.