Kay Ryan

Living with Stripes
In tigers, zebras,

and other striped creatures,

any casual posture

plays one beautiful set of lines

against another:

herringbones and arrows

appear and disappear;

chevrons widen and narrow.

Miniature themes and counterpoints

occur in the flexing and extending

of the smaller joints.

How can they stand to drink,

when lapping further complicates

the way the water duplicates their lines?

Knowing how their heads will zigzag out,

I wonder if they dread to start sometimes.

Even the clean

blue-green water

of the cirque,

with nothing

in between

the snow and it

but slant

can’t speed

the work,

must wait

upon whatever

makes it white

to dissipate.

It seems

so hard to think

that even lakes

so pure

should start opaque,

that something

always

has to recombine

or sink.

Not just lilacs

are like that;

other purples also

leave us vacant

portals, susceptible

to vagrant spirits.

But take that vase

of lilacs: who goes

near it is erased.

In spite of Proust,

the senses don’t

attach us to a place

or time: we’re used

by sweetness—

taken, defenseless,

invaded by a line

of Saracens,

Picts, Angles,

double rows of

fragrance-loving

ancients—people

matched casually

by nose in an

impersonal and

intermittent immortality

of purple.

Words especially

are subject to

the chemistry

of death: it is

an acid bath

which dissolves

or doubles

their strength.

Sentiments

which pleased

drift down

as sediment;

iron trees

grow from filament.

As neatly as peas

in their green canoe,

as discretely as beads

strung in a row,

sit drops of dew

along a blade of grass.

But unattached and

subject to their weight,

they slip if they accumulate.

Down the green tongue

out of the morning sun

into the general damp,

they’re gone.

There is a nacreous gleam

in certain areas of the mind

where something must have been

at some time—

perhaps many somethings,

judging by the pearlescence;

maybe the same weightless pleasures

or the same elusive lessons

repeated and repeated

with the patience

of the lacquer artist seated

at his task—eighty

coats per Japanese box.

And every word written shall lift off

letter by letter, the backward text

read ever briefer, ever more antic

in its effort to insist that nothing

shall be lost.

You will get your full measure.

But, as when asking fairies for favors,

there is a trick: it comes in a block.

And of course one block is not

like another. Some respond to water,

giving everything wet a little flavor.

Some succumb to heat like butter.

Others give to steady pressure.

Others shatter at a tap. But

some resist; nothing in nature softens up

their bulk and no personal attack works.

People whose gift will not break

live by it all their lives; it shadows

every empty act they undertake.

Throughout the sky

there are cinders

black as the night.

These are unborn stars

awaiting their source of light

A thought is dumb,

without eyes, ears,

opposable thumb,

or a tongue.

A thought lives

underground, not

wholly moleish

but with some

of the same

disinterests.

The amazing thing

is that it isn’t helpless.

Of all creatures

it is the most

random eater.

Caring only for travel

it eats whatever

roots, ants, or gravel

it meets. It occupies

no more space

than moles. We know it

only by some holes

and the way

apparently healthy notions

topple in the garden.