"A cleaving to a certain freedom..."

A melancholy rage, a fiery laze. A sullen funk, an unproductive morning. A glaring footdrag of errands, an armful of literary mags (the new Granta, the new Bookforum, the new Believer, buying the Boston Review for a new Anne Carson poem...) and a latte.

And a discovery. A wish, a truth:

To be free of the need
to make a waste of money
when my passion,
first and last,
is for the ecstatic lash
of the poetic line
and no visible recompense.

Fanny Howe, "Poem from a Single Pallet"