friday refrains · inevitably, kay ryan
Friday 25 July 2008 | I like a cookie
She and a friend had left California on a 4,000-mile cross-country bicycle trip, which would give her time to think about whether to devote herself to poetry as a vocation. She had been writing for more than 10 years, ever since her father’s death when she was 19. Yet in the preceding few months, as she recalls, “I really found that poetry was taking over my mind.” One night, as she read a book of prose, “everything seemed to rhyme.”
As the friends pedaled through Colorado, the repetitive, rhythmic exercise gave Ryan a sense of oneness with her surroundings, as if “I could pass through the pine trees and they through me.” She suddenly felt as if she “knew everything,” she says. “I wasn’t bound by the ordinary structures of ego.”
In that moment of heightened awareness, Ryan, who is not religious, asked the universe whether she should be a writer.
The answer she got was clear and surprising: “Do you like it?”
Yes, she realized, she liked writing better than anything else.
HOME TO ROOST
The chickens
are circling and
blotting out the
day. The sun is
bright, but the
chickens are in
the way. Yes,
the sky is dark
with chickens,
dense with them.
They turn and
then they turn
again. These
are the chickens
you let loose
one at a time
and small—
various breeds.
Now they have
come home
to roost—all
the same kind
at the same speed.
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