"But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise."

—Jane Kenyon, Otherwise

The full poem this closes is a meditation on an ordinary morning—getting up, eating breakfast, the dog following at her heels. Kenyon wrote it knowing she was seriously ill. What she describes is not nostalgia or grief exactly, but a quality of attention—the ordinary day made luminous by the knowledge that it will not always be available.

Self-will moves quickly through ordinary days, treating them as the space between more significant things. What Kenyon points toward may be a different quality of inhabiting—not dramatic, not achieved through effort, but a willingness to notice what is actually here while it is here. The bed. The light. The morning that arrived without being managed. These may be closer to what matters than almost anything we spend our days securing.