Torment by appetite is itself an appetite dulled by inarticulate, dogged, daily loving-others-to-death— as Chekhov put it, "compassion down to your fingertips"— looking on them as into the sun not in the least for their sake but slowly for your own because it causes the blinded soul to bloom like deliciousness in dirt, like beauty from hurt, their light—their light— pulls so surely. Let it.
From New and Selected Poems by Michael Ryan. Copyright © 2004 by Michael Ryan. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.