Quotes from Kay Ryan

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. Stardust

The Well or the Cup How can you tell at the start what you can give away and what you must hold to your heart. What is the well and what is a cup. Some people get drunk up.

No Names There are high places that don't invite us, sharp shapes, glacier- scraped faces, whole ranges whose given names slip off. Any such relation as we try to make refuses to take. Some high lakes are not for us, some slick escarpments. I'm giddy with thinking where thinking can't stick.

WINTER FEAR Is it just winter or is this worse. Is this the year when outer damp obscures a deeper curse that spring can't fix, when gears that turn the earth won't shift the view, when clouds won't lift though all the skies go blue.

The Self Is Not Portable The self is not portable. It cannot be packed. It comes sneaking back to any place from which it's been extracted, for it is nothing alone. It is not an entity. The ratio of self to home: one part in seventy.

The dead do not become stars or ghosts. in fact, they are hardly undone. Soon their randomly dispersed parts reappear one by one on foreign hosts- the beloved ear or freckled arm, separate as a milagro or bracelet charm. It is not grotesque, though odd. Even a piece does us some good. "Charms

Why Isn't It All More Marked? Why isn't it all more marked, why isn't every wall graffitied, every park tree stripped like the stark limbs in the house of the chimpanzees? Why is there bark Left? Why do people Cling to their Shortening shrifts? So Silent. Not why people are; Why not more violent? We must be So absorbent. We must be Almost crystals Almost all some Neutralizing chemical That really does Clarify and bring peace, Take black sorrow and make surcease

Hide and Seek It's hard not to jump out instead of waiting to be found. It's hard to be alone so long and then hear someone come around. It's like some form of skin's developed in the air that, rather than have torn, you tear.

The day misspent, the love misplaced, has inside it the seed of redemption. Nothing is exempt from resurrection.

The satisfactions/of agreement are/immediate as sugar--/a melting of the/granular, a syrup/that lingers, shared/not singular./Many prefer it.

To do it all we must do it too soon: shoot before the moon to shoot the moon, we learn, having shot it dead, bagged now and heavy as a head.

One need not smoke to inhale. The air in bars holds its load of tars in stale suspension. Also jails. Jails are a prison for the person who abhors smoke. But happily gorgeous thought also hangs around like that: you can walk through a mist of Brodsky and contact- exist.

A certain kind of Eden holds us thrall.

How Birds Sing One is not taxed; one need not practice; one simply tips the throat back over the spine axis and asserts the chest. The wings and the rest compress a musical squeeze which floats a series of notes upon the breeze.

All I trust is whistling in the dark. from section 3 of "Radiantly Indefensible," The American Poetry Review (vol. 49, no. 3, May/June 2020)

The Niagara River by Kay Ryan As though the river were a floor, we position our table and chairs upon it, eat, and have conversation. As it moves along, we notice — as calmly as though dining room paintings were being replaced — the changing scenes along the shore. We do know, we do know this is the Niagara River, but it is hard to remember what that means

There are high places that don't invite us, sharp shapes, glacier-scraped faces, whole ranges whose given names slip off. Any such relation as we try to make refuses to take…I'm giddy with thinking where thinking can't stick. No Names

HEAVENS NEED FURNACES Heavens need furnaces, The factories where dross converts to light gasses. The sloughed skins of dreams are instant fuel, remarkably full of oil like creosote bushes. Your worst losses warm angels; despair puts a glint on God's hair. And the nicest surprise is the substance that rises when you know you can't get there from here.

Like boulders rolled away from doors, like meteors, things rumbling in my brain ask me to go out like Moses into some wilderness.

Rubbing Lamps Things besides Aladdin's and the golden cave fish's lamps grant wishes. In fact, most lamps aren't lamp- shaped and happen by accident: an ordinary knob goes lambent as you twist or a cloth turns to silver mesh against a dish- something so odd and filled with promise for a minute that you spend your only wish wishing someone else could see it.

Witness Never trust a witness. By the time a thing is Noticed, it has happened. Some magician's redirected Our attention to the rabbit. The best life is suspected, Not examined. And never trust reverse. The mourners of the dead Count backward from the date Of the event, rehearsing Its approach, investing Final words with greatest weight, As though weight ever Carried what we meant: As though he could have Told us where he went.

Lacunae Lacunae aren't What was going to be Empty anyway. They aren't spaces With uses, such As margins or highway edges. Lacunae are losses In the middle of places- Drops where something Documented happened But the document is Gone-pond shaped Or jagged.

Losses Most losses add something- A new socket or silence, A gap in a personal Archipelago of islands. We have that difference To visit- itself A going-on of sorts. But there are other losses So far beyond report That they leave holes In holes only Like the ends of the Long and lonely lives Of castaways Thought dead but not.

Lightning, but not bright. Thunder, but not loud. Sometimes something in the sky connects to something in the ground in ways we don't expect and more or less miss except through reverse drama: things were heightened and now they're calmer. -- Reverse Drama