Kay Ryan

  • Rafael Ramosцитируетв прошлом году
    Living with Stripes
    In tigers, zebras,

    and other striped creatures,

    any casual posture

    plays one beautiful set of lines

    against another:

    herringbones and arrows

    appear and disappear;

    chevrons widen and narrow.

    Miniature themes and counterpoints

    occur in the flexing and extending

    of the smaller joints.

    How can they stand to drink,

    when lapping further complicates

    the way the water duplicates their lines?

    Knowing how their heads will zigzag out,

    I wonder if they dread to start sometimes.
  • Rafael Ramosцитируетв прошлом году
    Even the clean

    blue-green water

    of the cirque,

    with nothing

    in between

    the snow and it

    but slant

    can’t speed

    the work,

    must wait

    upon whatever

    makes it white

    to dissipate.

    It seems

    so hard to think

    that even lakes

    so pure

    should start opaque,

    that something

    always

    has to recombine

    or sink.
  • Rafael Ramosцитируетв прошлом году
    Not just lilacs

    are like that;

    other purples also

    leave us vacant

    portals, susceptible

    to vagrant spirits.

    But take that vase

    of lilacs: who goes

    near it is erased.

    In spite of Proust,

    the senses don’t

    attach us to a place

    or time: we’re used

    by sweetness—

    taken, defenseless,

    invaded by a line

    of Saracens,

    Picts, Angles,

    double rows of

    fragrance-loving

    ancients—people

    matched casually

    by nose in an

    impersonal and

    intermittent immortality

    of purple.
  • Rafael Ramosцитируетв прошлом году
    Words especially

    are subject to

    the chemistry

    of death: it is

    an acid bath

    which dissolves

    or doubles

    their strength.

    Sentiments

    which pleased

    drift down

    as sediment;

    iron trees

    grow from filament.
  • Rafael Ramosцитируетв прошлом году
    As neatly as peas

    in their green canoe,

    as discretely as beads

    strung in a row,

    sit drops of dew

    along a blade of grass.

    But unattached and

    subject to their weight,

    they slip if they accumulate.

    Down the green tongue

    out of the morning sun

    into the general damp,

    they’re gone.
  • Rafael Ramosцитируетв прошлом году
    There is a nacreous gleam

    in certain areas of the mind

    where something must have been

    at some time—

    perhaps many somethings,

    judging by the pearlescence;

    maybe the same weightless pleasures

    or the same elusive lessons

    repeated and repeated

    with the patience

    of the lacquer artist seated

    at his task—eighty

    coats per Japanese box.
  • Rafael Ramosцитируетв прошлом году
    And every word written shall lift off

    letter by letter, the backward text

    read ever briefer, ever more antic

    in its effort to insist that nothing

    shall be lost.
  • Rafael Ramosцитируетв прошлом году
    You will get your full measure.

    But, as when asking fairies for favors,

    there is a trick: it comes in a block.

    And of course one block is not

    like another. Some respond to water,

    giving everything wet a little flavor.

    Some succumb to heat like butter.

    Others give to steady pressure.

    Others shatter at a tap. But

    some resist; nothing in nature softens up

    their bulk and no personal attack works.

    People whose gift will not break

    live by it all their lives; it shadows

    every empty act they undertake.
  • Rafael Ramosцитируетв прошлом году
    Throughout the sky

    there are cinders

    black as the night.

    These are unborn stars

    awaiting their source of light
  • Rafael Ramosцитируетв прошлом году
    A thought is dumb,

    without eyes, ears,

    opposable thumb,

    or a tongue.

    A thought lives

    underground, not

    wholly moleish

    but with some

    of the same

    disinterests.

    The amazing thing

    is that it isn’t helpless.

    Of all creatures

    it is the most

    random eater.

    Caring only for travel

    it eats whatever

    roots, ants, or gravel

    it meets. It occupies

    no more space

    than moles. We know it

    only by some holes

    and the way

    apparently healthy notions

    topple in the garden.
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