The Niagara River by Kay Ryan

Author:Kay Ryan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2005-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

THIN

How anything

is known

is so thin—

a skin of ice

over a pond

only birds might

confidently walk

upon. A bird’s

worth of weight

or one bird-weight

of Wordsworth.

STARDUST

Stardust is

the hardest thing

to hold out for.

You must

make of yourself

a perfect plane—

something still

upon which

something settles—

something like

sugar grains on

something like

metal, but with

none of the chill.

It’s hard to explain.

REPULSIVE THEORY

Little has been made

of the soft skirting action

of magnets reversed,

while much has been

made of attraction.

But is it not this pillowy

principle of repulsion

that produces the

doily edges of oceans

or the arabesques of thought?

And do these cutout coasts

and in-curved rhetorical beaches

not baffle the onslaught

of the sea or objectionable people

and give private life

what small protection it’s got?

Praise then the oiled motions

of avoidance, the pearly

convolutions of all that

slides off or takes a

wide berth; praise every

eddying vacancy of Earth,

all the dimpled depths

of pooling space, the whole

swirl set up by fending off—

extending far beyond the personal,

I’m convinced—

immense and good

in a cosmological sense:

unpressing us against

each other, lending

the necessary never

to never-ending.

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