It should be difficult,
always difficult, rising
from bed each morning,
against gravity, against
dreams, which weigh
like the forgotten names
of remembered faces.
But some days it’s
easy, nothing, to rise,
to feed, to work, to
commit the small graces
that add up to love,
to family, to memory,
finally to life, or
what one would choose
to remember of it, not
those other leaden
mornings when sleep
is so far preferable
to pulling over one’s
head the wet shirt
of one’s identity again,
the self one had been
honing or fleeing
all these years,
one’s fine, blessed
self, one’s only,
which another day fills.
From The Trembling Answers. Copyright © 2017 by Craig Morgan Teicher. Used with the permission of BOA Editions.