The Best American Poetry 2012 by Mark Doty & David Lehman

Author:Mark Doty & David Lehman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner Poetry

KAY RYAN

Playacting

Early tribal cultures, while celebrating their rites of initiation or sacrifice, retained a very precise and subliminal awareness that the compulsive extremes to which they went . . . were in essence mere playacting, even though the performance could sometimes approach the point of death.

—W. G. Sebald, Campo Santo

Something inside says

there will be a curtain,

maybe or maybe not

some bowing, probably

no roses, but certainly

a chance to unverse

or dehearse, after all

these acts. For some

fraction of the self

has always held out, the

evidence compounding

in a bank becoming

grander and more

marble: even our

most wholehearted

acts are partial.

Therefore this small

change, unspendable,

of a different metal,

accruing in a strange

account. What could it

be for but passage out?

from The Threepenny Review

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.