Transcendental Etude by Adrienne Rich (1978)

No one ever told us we had to study our lives,
make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history or music, that we should begin
with the simple exercises first
slowly go on trying
the hard ones, practicing till strength
and accuracy became one with the daring
to leap into transcendence, take the chance
of breaking down in the wild arpeggio
or faulting the full sentence of the fugue.
—And in fact we can’t live like that: we take on everything at once before we’ve even begun
to read or mark time, we’re forced to begin
in the midst of the hardest movement,
the one already sounding as we are born.