It’s rare to find exactly the perfect poem for exactly the right moment. The entirety of “Stone” doesn’t do it for me, but the selected excerpts so do.

from Stone
–Anne Michaels
Beatrice called him a pig and a pearl.
But she also liked to say,
lovers are equal only when so steeped
in corruption, knowledge of the other
is no longer a weapon.

…

At first it wasn’t passion, felt more
like memory – as if, in remaining true to myself,
to everything in my life that had come before,
there could be no direction but towards him.