by Kay Ryan
ALSO BY KAY RYAN
The Best of It: New and Selected Poems
The Jam Jar Lifeboat and Other Novelties Exposed
The Niagara River
Say Uncle
Elephant Rocks
Flamingo Watching
Strangely Marked Metal
Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends
ERRATIC
FACTS
POEMS
KAY RYAN
Copyright © 2015 by Kay Ryan
Jacket design: Becca Fox Design and Gretchen Mergenthaler
Jacket photograph from postcard by The Rotograph Co. 1904–1911
Author photograph © Don J. Usner
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Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-8021-2405-0
eISBN 978-0-8021-9085-7
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
groveatlantic.com
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Singular thanks to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for their support during the writing of most of this book.
for Carol anyhow
erratic: (n) Geol. A boulder or the like carried by glacial ice and deposited some distance from its place of origin
CONTENTS
NEW ROOMS
ON THE NATURE OF UNDERSTANDING
WHY EXPLAIN THE PRECISE BY WAY OF THE LESS PRECISE?
SHIP IN A BOTTLE
MONK STYLE
DRY THINGS
ERASURE
AN INSTRUMENT WITH KEYS
BRIEF REAL THINGS
HOMAGE TO JOSEPH BRODSKY
DOUBLE FLOOR
FIZZ
BREATHER
ALL YOUR HORSES
ALL YOU DID
PUTTING THINGS IN PROPORTION
PLAYACTING
NIGHTINGALE FLOOR
TOKEN LOSS
SALVATION
FOOL’S ERRANDS
THE PAW OF A CAT
VENICE
TREADING WATER
FATAL FLAW
SPLITTING ICE
CRISS CROSSES
LITTLE DOTS
DRAGON’S TEETH
SHOOT THE MOON
A KIND OF LIFE
BUNCHED CLOTHS
THE MAIN DIFFICULTY OF WATER WHEELS
WHY IT IS HARD TO START
MUSICAL CHAIRS
SOCK
MY KINGDOM FOR A HORSE
THINGS THAT HAVE STAYED IN POSITION
METAL
BURNING TENT
TRACERS
TRIPPED
THOSE PLACES
A TRENCH LIKE THAT
ALMOST
VELVET
DYNAMIC SCALING
MEMORY TABLE
NATURE STUDY: SPOTS
MISER TIME
MORE OF THE SAME
THE FIRST OF NEVER
ALBUM
THE OBSOLETION OF A LANGUAGE
PARTY SHIP
BLAST
STILL START
EGGS
PINHOLE
IN CASE OF COMPLETE REVERSAL
STRUCK TREE
ERRATIC FACTS
NEW ROOMS
The mind must
set itself up
wherever it goes
and it would be
most convenient
to impose its
old rooms—just
tack them up
like an interior
tent. Oh but
the new holes
aren’t where
the windows
went.
ON THE NATURE OF UNDERSTANDING
Say you hoped to
tame something
wild and stayed
calm and inched up
day by day. Or even
not tame it but
meet it half way.
Things went along.
You made progress,
understanding
it would be a
lengthy process,
sensing changes
in your hair and
nails. So it’s
strange when it
attacks: you thought
you had a deal.
WHY EXPLAIN THE PRECISE BY WAY OF THE LESS PRECISE?
—Timothy Eastman, Physics and Whitehead: Process, Quantum and Experience
It doesn’t seem
right to think
blunt blows
could do a thing
like that but
we do know
arrowheads
are knapped
with rocks so
maybe it is
possible that
some kind of edge
could result from
generalized
impacts or large
blasts, a mind
grow somehow
more exact.
SHIP IN A BOTTLE
It seems
impossible—
not just a
ship in a
bottle but
wind and sea.
The ship starts
to struggle—an
emergency of the
too realized we
realize. We can
get it out but
not without
spilling its world.
A hammer tap
and they’re free.
Which death
will it be,
little sailors?
MONK STYLE
In practice, it took 45 minutes to get his stride.
It was hard for Monk to play Monk.
—NPR
It may be that
Monk is always
playing Monk but
down the hall.
There are
long corridors
as in a school.
Monk must
approach himself,
join himself
at the bench
and sit awhile.
Then slip his
hands into his
hands Monk
style.
DRY THINGS
The water level
comes up when
you throw in
stones, bricks,
anything that
sinks. It’s a
miracle when
that works,
don’t you think?
Dry things
letting us
drink?
ERASURE
We just don’t
know what
erases what
or much about
the deep nature
of erasure. But
these places with
rubbery crumbs
are exciting us
currently; this
whole area
may have
been
a defactory.
AN INSTRUMENT WITH KEYS
As though memory
were not a history
but an instrument
with keys on which
no C would stay played
without rehitting C.
As though memory
were a large orchestra
without a repertoire
till it began.
Whereupon
it remembered
all of Chopin.
BRIEF REAL THINGS
He did not live in conventional order from day to day, but grew strong or weak like the wind.
—David Thompson, Wild Excursions:
The Life and Fiction of Lawrence Sterne
Creatures whose
habits match nothing
we understand
are untrackable by our
most implacable
trackers of air
sea and land.
As though conjured
by conditions;
as though constellations
fretted something
to existence; as though
larger arrangements—and
the trackers regret this—
produced brief real things
in real places.
HOMAGE TO JOSEPH BRODSKY
One need not smoke
to inhale. The air
in bars holds its
load of tars in
stale suspension.
Also jails. Jails
are a prison for
the person who
abhors smoke.
But happily
gorgeous thought
also hangs around
like that: you can
walk through a mist
of Brodsky and contact-exist.
DOUBLE FLOOR
… one sometimes does have a sense that there is a double floor someplace …
—W. G. Sebald
The dual-pupiled
frog eye can
scan for food
and trouble
above and below
the water at once.
This, like
many forms of
doubleness,
serves local
purposes
(lulling us
to the essential
focal baffling
inherent in
experience:
how the splits
keep happening).
FIZZ
It may be
all there is
but we don’t
understand
it: the fizz
of conversion.
Or we hope
it obtains
only in objects
or persons
not us. Or
precious to
us. A remote
effervescence
we can’t like
up close. How
it works at
a surface as
though it were
false, sizzling
inside a face
until it comes
loose.
BREATHER
Maybe there
will be a
place inside
the current a
corner where
you can
recover a
rock pocket
that slowed
the water
if you were a
fish instead
of a person
with your
gills so wide
they can
see through
your head.
ALL YOUR HORSES
Say when rain
cannot make
you more wet
or a certain
thought can’t
deepen and yet
you think it again:
you have lost
count. A larger
amount is
no longer a
larger amount.
There has been
a collapse; perhaps
in the night.
Like a rupture
in water (which
can’t rupture
of course). All
your horses
broken out with
all your horses.
ALL YOU DID
There doesn’t seem
to be a crack. A
higher pin cannot
be set. Nor can
you go back. You
hadn’t even known
the face was vertical.
All you did was
walk into a room.
The tipping up
from flat was
gradual, you
must assume.
PUTTING THINGS IN PROPORTION
The tree must be
bigger than
the house, the
doors of which
must fix upon
a width proportionate
to people. Objects
in the rooms
must coexist.
A kettle can’t
be bigger than
a table. Interiors
must fit inside
in general. With
spaces left besides.
Swift justice to
rogue sizes, is what
we say—we have to
say. No one can
get along the
other way.
PLAYACTING
Something inside says
there will be a curtain,
maybe or maybe not
some bowing, probably
no roses, but certainly
a chance to unverse
or dehearse, after all
these acts. For some
fraction of the self
has always held out, the
evidence compounding
in a bank becoming
grander and more
marble: even our
most wholehearted
acts are partial.
Therefore this small
change, unspendable,
of a different metal,
accruing in a strange
account. What could it
be for but passage out?
NIGHTINGALE FLOOR
An ingenious floor, clamped and nailed in place: walking on it caused friction between the nails and their clamps, emitting the giveaway sounds. There was no way to move silently on it and it had been the shoguns’ warning against spies and assassins.
—Marshall Browne, Rendezvous at Kamakura Inn
Pressure anywhere
betrays betrayal: a
thousand birds awaken
from their sleep as nails.
Not patience nor
persuasion nor
dark of night
nor black costume
nor other steps taken
go an inch toward
getting past that floor
and at the shogun
who lives within his rooms
as upon an island
in the middle of a
polished wooden sea
so tuned to treachery
that sometimes
just the heat of sunlight
is misread as feet.
TOKEN LOSS
To the dragon
any loss is
total. His rest
is disrupted
if a single
jewel encrusted
goblet has
been stolen.
The circle
of himself
in the nest
of his gold
has been
broken. No
loss is token.
SALVATION
Like hope, it springs
eternal, existing in
discrete but spherical
units: a mist of total
but en
capsulated
salvational events.
However if any
of these bubbles
bang against each other
no walls collapse
or double to a larger chamber,
unlike the halls of soap.
FOOL’S ERRANDS
A thing
cannot be
delivered
enough times:
this is the
rule of dogs
for whom there
are no fool’s
errands. To
loop out and
come back is
good all alone.
It’s gravy to
carry a ball
or a bone.
THE PAW OF A CAT
The first trickle
of water down
a dry ditch stretches
like the paw
of a cat, slightly
tucked at the front,
unambitious
about auguring
wet. It may sink
later but it hasn’t
yet.
VENICE
There is a category
of person eased
by constraint, soothed
when things cease.
It is the assault
of abundance
from which they seek
release. The gorgeous
intensities of Venice
would work best
for these people
at a distance:
sitting, for example,
in a departing
train car, feeling the
menace settle.
TREADING WATER
When water
is so hard to
tread, it seems
purposely hurtful
that this is
so often said
dismissively.
With so much
paper spread
over the water’s
surface, it’s
incredible trouble
to paddle even
a small doglike
vertical paddle
in a circle.
