Poem of the Week

Doublet

Isabel Neal

I wrote an ode

to reticence, my habit

of perfection. The held

and holding word,

its wetting tract is not,

as Hopkins said, renunciation

but a space, I think

for coiled sound to shift.

It’s like a net.

Are reticence and silence one?

Reticle (or reticule)

means satchel, purse,

a woven clutch to keep

the daily things no longer kept

in pockets. And it means sighting,

too: crosshair. Held again,

this time in distant, urgent

threat. To see to hunt.

Spectral, haptic sight,

those lines. The eye is throne

or snare. And other nets will speak

in other ways: the veins

across my retina recite

to ophthalmologists

I couldn’t wait, my summoning

was pressure-point massage, was

brimming moon.

Their fuller curl, prevented

by my early birth (wettish-lunged

and burning blue),

just stops. Unlike a reticence,

the thing I call my quiet.

Under-slumber, buckle

my mouth is.

And was it good,

to be this way and not

be known? It’s like a net.

I wrote it down.

how did this poem begin for you?

I was noticing nets. Separately, I had a desire to index certain kinds of restraint, in and outside of my writing. I went to etymology: reticence, then reticle (which feel etymologically related, though they aren’t). Reticle does share a root with net, though, and this offered some of the images and associations—with speech, and sight, and holding, and risk—that helped the poem begin, in my mind and on the page.

From Thrown Voice by Isabel Neal, published by Yale University Press in March 2026 in the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Reproduced by permission.

Isabel Neal holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan and lives in Maine. Her writing has been published in Waxwing, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. Thrown Voice is her first collection.

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