Losses
Most losses add something —
a new socket or silence,
a gap in a personal
archipelago of islands.
We have that difference
to visit—itself
a going-on of sorts.
But there are other losses
so far beyond report
that they leave holes
in holes only
like the ends of the
long and lonely lives
of castaways
thoughts dead but not.
It’s hard not
to jump out
instead of
waiting to be
found. It’s
hard to be
alone so long
and then hear
someone come
around. It’s
like some form
of skin’s developed
in the air
that, rather
than have torn,
you tear.
(“Hide and Seek” was originally published in “The Niagara River” by Kay Ryan, Grove Press Poetry Series, 2005.)
Read MoreWho would be a turtle who could help it?
A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet,
She can ill afford the chances she must take
In rowing toward the grasses that she eats.
Her track is graceless, like dragging
A packing-case places, and almost any slope
Defeats her modest hopes. Even being practical,
She’s often stuck up to the axle on her way
To something edible. With everything optimal,
She skirts the ditch which would convert
Her shell into a serving dish. She lives
Below luck-level, never imagining some lottery
Will change her load of pottery to wings.
Her only levity is patience,
The sport of truly chastened things.
Who, who had only seen wings,
could extrapolate the
skinny sticks of things
birds use for land,
the backward way they bend,
the silly way they stand?
And who, only studying
birdtracks in the sand,
could think those little forks
had decamped on the wind?
So many paired things seem odd.
Who ever would have dreamed
the broad winged raven of despair
would quit the air and go
bandylegged upon the ground,
a common crow?
—Kay Ryan, 1994
Read MoreFirst among places
susceptible to trespass
are mirage oases
whose graduated pools
and shaded grasses, palms
and speckled fishes give
before the lightest pressure
and are wrecked.
For they live
only in the kingdom
of suspended wishes,
thrive only at our pleasure
checked.
—Kay Ryan, 1997
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