after Saeed Jones’s A Spell to Banish Grief
Only when you can delete your Submittable account, and box your poetry books into a cartonshipped to a country without birds or borders; only when you let go of the feeling of fallingbetween the cut and argument of lines into the slough of sleep; only whenno dénouement, or turn of phrase, or assonance, or irony can leave you grasping or breathless;only when libraries stop making you wonder about wonder; only when you can leavescribbled-on pages in the rain, their vulnerability a requiem to roadkill; only when you seethe white page as others do – as blank vistas of dead paper to be filled by nothing, onlywhen you are emptied of anything to feel, say, and by saying, I mean, write, unable to sharpenthe edge of your pen grinding against paper; only then, poet, only then, call yourselfhealed of this affliction.
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