Kay Ryan

Who would be a turtle who could help it? A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet, she can ill afford the chances she must take in rowing toward the grasses that she eats. Her track is graceless, like dragging a packing-case places, and almost any slope defeats her modest hopes. Even being practical, she's often stuck up to the axle on her way to something edible. With everything optimal, she skirts the ditch which would convert her shell into a serving dish. She lives below luck-level, never imagining some lottery will change her load of pottery to wings. Her only levity is patience, the sport of truly chastened things.

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.

Tenderness and rot share a border. And rot is an aggressive neighbor whose iridescence keeps creeping over. No lessons can be drawn from this however. One is not two countries. One is not meat corrupting. It is important to stay sweet and loving.

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 fits. Take glass. Sometimes it outlasts its underside. Take reefs. The private lives of surfaces are innocent, not devious. Take the one-dimensional belief of enamel in itself, the furious autonomy of luster (crush a pearl— it’s powder), the whole curious seamlessness of how we’re each surrounded and what it doesn’t teach.

As if engine parts could be wrenched out at random and the car would still start and sound even, hearts can go with chambers broken open.

In harmony with the rule of irony— which requires that we harbor the enemy on this side of the barricade—the shell of the unborn eagle or pelican, which is made to give protection till the great beaks can harden, is the first thing to take up poison. The mineral case is soft and gibbous as the moon in a lake—an elastic, rubbery, nightmare water that won't break. Elsewhere, also, I see the mockeries of struggle, a softness over people.

Everything contains some silence. Noise gets its zest from the small shark's-tooth shaped fragments of rest angled in it. An hour of city holds maybe a minute of these remnants of a time when silence reigned, compact and dangerous as a shark. Sometimes a bit of a tail or fin can still be sensed in parks.

Like hope it springs eternal, existing in discrete but spherical units, a mist of total but encapsulated salvational events. If any two of these bubbles bang against each other no walls collapse or double to a larger chamber unlike the halls of soap.

The wreck is a fact. The worst has happened. The salvage trucks back in and the salvage men begin to sort and stack, whistling as they work. Thanks be to god—again— for extractable elements which are not carriers of pain, for this periodic table at which the self-taught salvagers disassemble the unthinkable to the unthought.

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 incurved 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.