Kay Ryan

Born into each seed is a small anti-seed useful in case of some complete reversal: a tiny but powerful kit for adapting it to the unimaginable. If we could crack the fineness of the shell we’d see the bundled minuses stacked as in a safe, ready for use if things don’t go well.

All you have to lose is one connection and the mind uncouples all the way back. It seems to have been a train. There seems to have been a track. The things that you unpack from the abandoned cars cannot sustain life: a crate of tractor axles, for example, a dozen dozen clasp knives, a hundred bolts of satin— perhaps you specialized more than you imagined.

For W.G. Sebald, 1944-2001 This was the work of St. Sebolt, one of his miracles: he lit a fire with icicles. He struck them like a steel to flint, did St. Sebolt. It makes sense only at a certain body heat. How cold he had to get to learn that ice would burn. How cold he had to stay. When he could feel his feet he had to back away.

Wherever the flamingo goes, she brings a city’s worth of furbelows. She seems unnatural by nature— too vivid and peculiar a structure to be pretty, and flexible to the point of oddity. Perched on those legs, anything she does seems like an act. Descending on her egg or draping her head along her back, she’s too exact and sinuous to convince an audience she’s serious. The natural elect, they think, would be less pink, less able to relax their necks, less flamboyant in general. They privately expect that it’s some poorly jointed bland grey animal with mitts for hands whom God protects.

Crow school is basic and short as a rule— just the rudiments of quid pro crow for most students. Then each lives out his unenlightened span, adding his bit of blight to the collected history of pushing out the sweeter species; briefly swaggering the swagger of his aggravating ancestors down my street. And every time I like him when we meet.

It is very stretchy. We know that, even if many details remain sketchy. It is complexly woven. That much too has pretty well been proven. We are loath to continue our lessons which consist of slaps as sharp and dispersed as bee stings from a smashed nest when any strand snaps— hurts working far past the locus of rupture, attacking threads far beyond anything we would have said connects.

Cut out as a horse is cut from the pack. Peeled off, but a long time back. Now such a feeling for the way they touch and shift as one, the beauty when they run.

Too much rain loosens trees. In the hills giant oaks fall upon their knees. You can touch parts you have no right to— places only birds should fly to.

The one sincere crocodile has gone dry eyed for years. Why bother crying crocodile tears.

A blue stain creeps across the deep pile of the evergreens. From inside the forest it seems like an interior matter, something wholly to do with trees, a color passed from one to another, a requirement to which they submit unflinchingly like soldiers or brave people getting older. Then the sun comes back and it’s totally over.