I learn the word for willow tree.
I learn the word for howl and keep

it in my throat. the word for wolf
curls underneath my tongue. I have

studied pain this way—tucking it
into the folds of my body where

darkness settles. I wonder about
the waking. the sunsplit

morning burns into orange peel—
dappled heat. an extinct

volcano comes back to life
but we aren’t told how we know

the mountain has begun to stir. how
stone yawns and spins hot into

the world again. I wish that I could
say that I saved the mourning dove,

but I can’t be sure. every bird dies
a death—falls from the sky and

sleeps. it is hard to banish this thought—
that everything wakes up and waits

for living. for the word that names
the blue color of a pale vein.

who wouldn’t want to wake an ancient
thing from the deepest sleep? who

wouldn’t want to dig and find the still-wet
blood of a long-dead fawn? a miracle,

maybe, how the earth shudders beneath
us. how we dance along the fractures.
from the journal THRUSH 
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Photograph of Bellarmine jugs from the Museum of London

"From Emily Berry’s 2017 collection, Stranger, Baby, 'Drunken Bellarmine' somehow delivers what the speaker says is beyond him or her: hard-won equilibrium. Yet nothing is smoothed over, muted or reconciled. The poem, like much of the collection, logs the vertiginous and rocky inner voyage of a speaker in extremis after the loss of their mother."

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"The ars poetica is a poem that takes the art of poetry as its subject matter. The tradition can be traced back to the Roman lyric poet Horace (ca. 19 B.C.E.) and his poem titled 'Ars Poetica,' in which he argues that poetry should be both amusing and instructive. Modern and contemporary poets have approached the genre in a myriad of ways over the years, employing it, for example, to construct broad defenses of poetry, or to make arguments for particular kinds of poetics, or as a space to meditate on or define their own aesthetics."
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