That Will to Divest by Kay Ryan

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 […]

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Patience by Kay Ryan

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 […]

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Surfaces by Kay Ryan

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 […]

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I Married You by Linda Pastan

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 […]

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Cousins by Linda Pastan

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 […]

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Prosody 101 by Linda Pastan

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 […]

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An Early Afterlife by Linda Pastan

 “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 […]

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