What you think is the point is not the point at all but only the beginning of the sharpness.
Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman

It’s hard for
the master
sharpener after
all that work
to have the shaft
taken for the point.
People run themselves
through right and
left and don’t
know they do.
The point is
sticking out their
back and they’re
still waiting
for it, looking
down the track.

Copyright © 2024 by Kay Ryan. This poem was first printed in Revel, Issue 1 (Winter 2024). Published in a special arrangement with Revel by permission of the author and Grove Press. 

Montaigne

You can oversell
the sea, say, or
the way we miss
the dead. The littlest
bit of absence excites
oceans. And of oceans
the less said the
better: the wet beyond
the land: we have a
built-in hair-trigger
primed to understand.

Copyright © 2024 by Kay Ryan. This poem was first printed in Revel, Issue 1 (Winter 2024). Published in a special arrangement with Revel by permission of the author and Grove Press. 

Since then I have slowly learned to grasp how everything is connected across space and time.
W.G. Sebald, A Place in the Country

There is a webby and
exalted state of
comprehension wherein
discrete events—like the
rigging lights of separate
boats upon a midnight
ocean—suggest a net:
something immense and
inclined to pulse—not
hideous with meaning yet
but already strangely tedious
if expressed.

Copyright © 2024 by Kay Ryan. This poem was first printed in Revel, Issue 1 (Winter 2024). Published in a special arrangement with Revel by permission of the author and Grove Press.