Kay Ryan

It seems like you could, but you can’t go back and pull the roots and runners and replant. It’s all too deep for that. You’ve overprized intention, have mistaken any bent you’re given for control. You thought you chose the bean and chose the soil. You even thought you abandoned one or two gardens. But those things keep growing where we put them— if we put them at all. A certain kind of Eden holds us thrall. Even the one vine that tendrils out alone in time turns on its own impulse, twisting back down its upward course a strong and then a stronger rope, the greenest saddest strongest kind of hope.

We are always really carrying a ladder, but it’s invisible. We only know something’s the matter: something precious crashes; easy doors prove impassable. Or, in the body, there’s too much swing or off- center gravity. And, in the mind, a drunken capacity, access to out-of-range apples. As though one had a way to climb out of the damage and apology.

The holes have almost left the sky and the blanks the paths—the patches next to natural, corroborated by the incidental sounds of practical activities and crows, themselves exhibiting many of the earmarks of the actual. This must have happened many times before, we must suppose. Almost a pulse if we could speed it up: the repeated seeking of our several senses toward each other, fibers trying to reach across the gap as fast as possible, following a blast.

If it please God, let less happen. Even out Earth's rondure, flatten Eiger, blanden the Grand Canyon. Make valleys slightly higher, widen fissures to arable land, remand your terrible glaciers and silence their calving, halving or doubling all geographical features toward the mean. Unlean against our hearts. Withdraw your grandeur from these parts.

The whole ball of who we are presses into the green baize at a single tiny spot. An aural track of crackle betrays our passage through the fibrous jungle. It’s hot and desperate. Insects spring out of it. The pressure is intense, and the sense that we’ve lost proportion. As though bringing too much to bear too locally were our decision.

There is a distance where magnets pull, we feel, having held them back. Likewise there is a distance where words attract. Set one out like a bait goat and wait and seven others will approach. But watch out: roving packs can pull your word away. You find your stake yanked and some rough bunch to thank.

Extreme exertion isolates a person from help, discovered Atlas. Once a certain shoulder-to-burden ratio collapses, there is so little others can do: they can’t lend a hand with Brazil and not stand on Peru.

Say when rain cannot make you more wet or a certain thought can’t deepen and yet you think it again: you have lost count. A larger amount is no longer a larger amount. There has been a collapse; perhaps in the night. Like a rupture in water (which can’t rupture of course). All your horses broken out with all your horses.

There doesn’t seem to be a crack. A higher pin cannot be set. Nor can you go back. You hadn’t even known the face was vertical. All you did was walk into a room. The tipping up from flat was gradual, you must assume.

Death has a life of  its own. See how its album has grown in a year and how the sharp blot of it has softened till those could almost be shadows behind the cherry blossoms in this shot. In fact you couldn’t prove they’re not.