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.