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 […]

I Married You Linda Pastan –   I married you for all the wrong reasons, charmed by your dangerous family history, by the innocent muscles, bulging like hidden weapons under your shirt, by your naive ties, the colors of painted scraps of sunset. I was charmed too by your assumptions about me: my serenity— that […]

To A Daughter Leaving Home by Linda Pastan When I taught you at eight to ride a bicycle, loping along beside you as you wobbled away on two round wheels, my own mouth rounding in surprise when you pulled ahead down the curved path of the park, I kept waiting for the thud of your crash […]

COUSINS by Linda Pastan We meet at funerals every few years—another star in the constellation of our family put out—and even in that failing light, we look completely different, completely the same. “What are you doing now?” we ask each other, “How have you been?”  At these times the past is more palpable than our children […]

Prosody 101 by Linda Pastan When they taught me that what mattered most was not the strict iambic line goose-stepping over the page but the variations in that line and the tension produced on the ear by the surprise of difference, I understood yet didn’t understand exactly, until just now, years later in spring, with […]

 “An early afterlife” by Linda Pastan Why don’t we say good-bye right now In the fallacy of perfect health before whatever is going to happen happens. We could perfect our parting, like those characters in On the Beach who said farewell in the shadow of the bomb as we sat watching, young and holding hands at […]