Poem: "Skills"

Skills


By an improved anguish

     Laura Riding, “The Wind Suffers”


As you would help a student organize
her shifty thoughts in shapely paragraphs,
stiffen the backbone of her sentences,
clear up the verbiage and proof the spelling,

you checked into a hospice, with his help,
after you stopped the ill treatment of death.
The passage would be lucid, you decided,
with humor, dignity, and, you hoped, grace.

So when the window rattled with the wind,
like an excessive use of the em dash,
you did not shush the weather with a comma
but left it alone—the inspired break.


i.m. Carol

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