On a walk about a month ago, lines from an older poem of mine, “The Waters of Separation,” ran through my mind repeatedly: we wait riven to the rocks peeling back, black in the water. I find you, my darling, knelt down and stung Why was I singing my own line? The stanzas sounded like another voice, not my own, but one just out of grasp. “My darling” seemed so cloying, yet I never could revise it out of the poem. Something about that “back, / black in the water” built to a gra