New and Selected Poems (Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award) - Hardcover

Michael Ryan is the author of three previous books of poetry. Threats Instead of Trees won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award and was a National Book Award finalist in 1974; In Winter was a National Poetry Series selection in 1981; and God Hunger won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize in 1990. He is also the author of A Difficult Grace, a collection of essays, and a memoir, Secret Life. His new memoir was excerpted in The New Yorker and will also appear this spring. Ryan is a professor of English and creative writing at the University of California, Irvine.

Threats from Instead of Trees

Speaking

I’m speaking again as the invalid in a dark room.
I want to say thank you out loud to no one.
I want to suck my cracked lips in on the sound, as the sound dissolves slowly like a man living.

I’m painfully grateful there’s breath to make noise with, and many words have meaning. I feel lucky when hello doesn’t hurt.
On a bus, I could love anyone.

It’s not terrible to be alone.
Last night I talked to a person so haltingly I might have been looking for a word that wouldn’t change.
That made her misconstrue everything.

Did she feel what I thought she was feeling?
Did she feel me concealing the pleasure that keeps me going, as I circled that pleasure like a dog around its master?
This pleasure, for me, is speaking, as if words enclosed the secret in myself that lasts after death.

The Myth For a long time, nothing happened.
Then ancestors whispering, then fragments of a forgotten life disturbing ordinary actions: handling a stone, or bathing, you might think of the brain as a diamond.
Even thought was clear, like watching your lover explore the bottom of a deep lake.
Everyone became friends, mirroring one another’s most personal gestures.
The leaders said this happiness is round like bowls, and devised simple rituals in which touch wasn’t a form of searching a finger’s curving could articulate anything.

Still, some looked for damage in the hard scars on our bodies.
They reminded us of the years of pain, when anticipation meant only disappointment, and any object we desired would cut brutally through the skin.
Shouldn’t we be ashamed?
Isn’t this history we imagine in that one’s ugly movement of his arms? Her clumsy legs?

Reverting to privacy, we began to see less distinctly.
Sometimes, during an intimate talk, you’d swear you caught your best friend closing his eyes, as in sadness at his own reflection.

So we tried exhaustion, swimming alone for days. Slowly we noticed our bodies becoming smooth and beautiful, and the air seemed less necessary the deeper we dove. Maybe we forgot we were actually underwater, forgetting, as we did, all harm done, all we couldn’t be for one another.

Copyright © 2004 by Michael Ryan.
Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.