It amazed Janine that she had been able to take advice from this woman, who had lived a different life than Janine could even imagine—a woman who still smoked like a chimney and did not seem familiar with or at least was not bound by social norms, a woman who talked openly about wanting to die. Yet Janine sensed that she was right about poetry, if nothing else, that she saw clear through to the problem, how what you were trying to say did not fit the way that you were saying it. After initial resistance Janine had started a new set of poems to go with Terri’s, this time from the point of view of the police officer who guarded her after they removed her feeding tubes, and she had worked on them all June and the beginning of July. She had not shown them to Lorraine yet, but had instead gotten stuck in the revisions of her original poems, and then on the terrible pressure of having one of those poems (virtually unchanged from her submission) out there, for anyone to read, on the Ranch’s website.

I HAVE WRITER’S BLOCK, she admitted yesterday. REVISER’S BLOCK?

THAT IS A MYTH, Lorraine wrote back, mystifyingly, and sent her a long and somewhat confusingly line-broken poem, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.” Janine printed the poem and highlighted the lines about heaven and hell, dutifully made a note to herself to read the Iliad, to look up the references she didn’t understand. But one part made her heart beat faster: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” Janine had found these words profound—they made her see desert wars, and her husband’s shouting news programs, and the stark white walls of a hospital. She’d looked up the poet and learned that he had also been a doctor—not the kind to leave a patient to die a thirsty death, but the old-fashioned kind who carried a doctor’s bag and made house calls. She read everything Lorraine sent her, two and three and four times over, but the lines about the news had stuck with her, and she’d recited them in her head on the long drive while Beth alternately texted and slept. It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.