I Copy Out One Poem Every Night Before Sleep
Someone else's words in my handwriting, the day's gentlest ending.
My handwriting at eleven at night tells the truth about my day better than I ever do. Cramped and stabbing after a bad one. Wide and looping when something went right. I know this because for the past two years and two hundred some nights, the last thing I do before sleep is copy out one poem, by hand, into a notebook. Not write one. Copy one. Someone else's words, my ink.
It started with insomnia, the industrial grade kind that moved in after Daniel left, when 2 a.m. became a room I lived in. My doctor said the usual things: no screens in bed, no caffeine after noon, keep the bedroom boring. My phone, of course, had become a slot machine I kept beside my pillow, and every night I pulled the lever until 3, reading the opinions of strangers about the collapse of everything.
The actual advice came from a librarian. Her name is Renata, she works the evening desk at my branch, and when I mumbled something about not sleeping while checking out a stack of books I would not read, she said, without looking up from the scanner, “Copy something out by hand before bed. A poem. Short one. Worked for my mother for fifty years.” Then she stamped my books like she hadn't just handed me a new spine for my life.
I tried it that night mostly to prove it wouldn't work. A cheap spiral notebook, a pen from a dentist's office, a short poem about a cold morning. It took six minutes. I remember being annoyed by how long six minutes felt, how loudly the pen scratched, how my hand ached by line ten because apparently I hadn't written more than a signature since 2011.
And then I remember waking up.
Which meant I had slept... which meant something.
Here is what nobody tells you about copying a poem by hand: it is the slowest possible way to read one, and the slowness is the entire point. Your eye skims. Your hand can't. When you copy, you feel every decision in your wrist: why the line breaks there and not one word later, why she said cold and not freezing, the comma that makes you hold your breath in the middle of line eight. Reading a poem is looking at a house. Copying one is walking through it with your hand on every wall.
Copying a poem is the slowest way to read and the closest way to listen.
The rules built themselves over time, the way real rituals do. One poem, no more, even when the next one is right there being gorgeous. Phone charges in the kitchen, exiled at 10:30. The notebook lives on the nightstand with the pen clipped to the current page, because if I have to search for either, the slot machine wins. I copy on good nights and terrible ones, at home and in hotels, once at my cousin's wedding at 1 a.m. on a page of resort stationery I taped in afterward, slightly wine drunk, the handwriting frankly festive.
The ritual doesn't require me to be at my best. That is why it works.
It only requires me to show up with a hand.
Choosing the poem takes longer than copying it, and the choosing turned out to be the secret cargo. Some nights I hunt through anthologies for twenty minutes for the thing I can't name until I see it. Some nights, when even choosing is too heavy, I use a prompt and pick whatever poem it drags out of the shelf. And about a year in, flipping back through my first notebook, I discovered what I had actually been keeping.
Not a collection. A diary.
I never write the date or a single word about my day, but I can open to any page and remember it exactly. There is a week in February that is all poems about loneliness, five nights straight, and I know precisely which week that was, whose voicemail I kept replaying. There is a stretch in June that turns, poem by poem, toward something lighter, and that is the month I stopped driving past our old apartment on purpose. I had been telling my notebook everything by telling it nothing. Just choices. It turns out you cannot hide from a record of what you needed to hear each night at eleven.
The night my father had his stroke, I got home from the hospital at midnight, hollowed out, smelling of antiseptic and vending machine coffee, and I stood at the shelf and could not find the poem. I must have opened nine books... Everything was wrong: too pretty, too wise, too finished. Everything sounded like someone who already knew how their story ended. Dad was three miles away hooked to a monitor whose beeping I could still hear in my teeth, and no dead poet had left me instructions for that specific dark.
So I did something against the rules. I copied the nearest short poem badly, some eight lines about a river I have no memory of, and then, below it, where there should have been white space, my hand kept going.
One line. My own.
The first line of my own I had written since high school.
The machines say his heart. The machines don't say his laugh.
That's all. I stared at it like it was a stranger's coat left in my house. Then I slept... actually slept... and in the morning my father was stable and asking the nurses for real eggs, and the line was still there in the notebook, still mine.
I wish I could say a poet was born that night, fully formed. What actually happened is slower and truer: the lines at the bottom of the page kept coming, one every few nights, crooked and unfinished under other people's finished ones. Copying had been my apprenticeship the whole time and I hadn't noticed. Two hundred poems through the wrist teaches you where lines want to break the way carrying groceries teaches you what your arms can hold. Eventually I got greedy to know why the good ones worked, and I signed up for actual lessons, where I learned, embarrassingly fast, that half my private discoveries had names and the other half were mistakes worth keeping.
Daniel, if you are wondering, is remarried and fine, and I genuinely hope his new house has good light. The insomnia visits sometimes, the way an old landlord might... but it doesn't have a key anymore.
There are seven notebooks now, shelved in order on the bookcase by my bed, and I understand what they are. They are the calmest version of me, filed by date. Two years of last thoughts, none of them from a screen, most of them borrowed, a growing number of them mine. When I die, whoever clears out this apartment will find seven books of poems in one hand's writing and think I wrote them all. Let them. By then it will be at least half true, and anyway, that is what the whole practice taught me about memory: we are all copied out of the people we loved and read, in handwriting that slowly becomes our own.
Tonight's poem is already chosen. It's short. The pen is clipped to the page.
The phone is in the kitchen, losing.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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