After Zeno by Kay Ryan After Zeno For my father By Kay Ryan When he was I was. But I still am and he is still. Where is is when is is was? I have an is but where is his? Now here— no where: such a little fatal pause. There’s no sense in past […]

THAT WILL TO DIVEST by Kay Ryan Action creates a taste for itself. Meaning: once you’ve swept the shelves of spoons and plates you kept for guests, it gets harder not to also simplify the larder, not to dismiss rooms, not to divest yourself of all the chairs but one, not to test what singleness […]

THE WOMAN WHO WROTE TOO MUCH by Kay Ryan I have written over the doors of the various houses and stores where friends and supplies were. Now I can’t locate them anymore and must shout general appeals in the street. It is a miracle to me now— when a piece of the structure unseals and […]

Patience Kay Ryan  Patience is wider than one once envisioned, with ribbons of rivers and distant ranges and tasks undertaken and finished with modest relish by natives in their native dress. Who would have guessed it possible that waiting is sustainable— a place with its own harvests. Or that in time’s fullness the diamonds of […]

Surfaces BY KAY RYAN Surfaces serve their own purposes, strive to remain constant (all lives want that). There is a skin, not just on peaches but on oceans (note the telltale slough of foam on beaches). Sometimes it’s loose, as in the case of cats: you feel how a second life slides under it. Sometimes it […]