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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.
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
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:
George Steiner, “The Poetry of Thought”
Unlike the
work of
most people
you’re supposed
to unthread
the needle.
It will be
a lifetime
task, far
from simple: