Cover Page

SAY UNCLE

ALSO BY KAY RYAN

Elephant Rocks

Flamingo Watching

Strangely Marked Metal

Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends

SAY UNCLE

poems

by

KAY RYAN

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications in which these poems first appeared:

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY: Among English Verbs; COLUMBIA: Weakness and Doubt, Drops in the Bucket, Failure 2, Gaps, Your Face Will Stick, Silence Islands, The Museum of False Starts, Agreement; THE GEOR-GIA REVIEW: Waste; THE JOURNAL: Help, Gravity; THE NEW YORKER: Blandeur, The Excluded Animals, The Old Cosmologists, Yeses, Failure, Deferred Silence, A Hundred Bolts of Satin, Patience, Crown, The Job; THE PARIS REVIEW: Crash, Lime Light, Dutch, Matrigupta; PARNASSUS: Forgetting; PARTISAN REVIEW: Death by Fruit; PLOUGHSHARES: Corners, Mockingbird; POETRY: Grazing Horses, Don’t Look Back, Herring, The Pieces That Fall to Earth, Winter Fear, Why We Must Struggle, The Fabric of Life, Test, Two More and Up Goes the Donkey; THE RECORDER: Bad Day; SALON: Nothing Ventured; SOLO: Ticket; THE SOUTHERN REVIEW: Water under the Bridge, Beasts, Composition, Diamonds, Coming and Going, Say Uncle, It’s Always Darkest Just before the Dawn, Great Thoughts; THE THREEPENNY REVIEW: Chemise, Cheshire; THE YALE REVIEW: That Will to Divest, The Catch, The Pass; WATER/STONE: Blunt; ZYZZYVA: Star Block

“That Will to Divest” also appeared in THE BEST AMERICAN POETRY 1999 (Scribner, 1999). “Angles of Sun” appeared in LIGHTHOUSE POEMS (Thornwillow Press, 2000). “Patience” was reprinted in the pamphlet series “Poems in the Waiting Room” by the Poetry Club of the City Literary Institute of London.

Some of these poems have appeared in an Aralia Press fine press edition, That Will to Divest, 1999.

Dedication

For Carol

SAY UNCLE

SAY UNCLE

Every day

you say,

Just one

more try.

Then another

irrecoverable

day slips by.

You will

say ankle,

you will

say knuckle;

why won’t

you why

won’t you

say uncle?

CORNERS

All but saints

and hermits

mean to paint

themselves

toward an exit

leaving a

pleasant ocean

of azure or jonquil

ending neatly

at the doorsill.

But sometimes

something happens:

a minor dislocation

by which the doors

and windows

undergo a

small rotation

to the left a little

—but repeatedly.

It isn’t

obvious immediately.

Only toward evening

and from the

farthest corners

of the houses

of the painters

comes a chorus

of individual keening

as of kenneled dogs

someone is mistreating.

STAR BLOCK

There is no such thing

as star block.

We do not think of

locking out the light

of other galaxies.

It is light

so rinsed of impurities

(heat, for instance)

that it excites

no antibodies in us.

Yet people are

curiously soluble

in starlight.

Bathed in its

absence of insistence

their substance

loosens willingly,

their bright

designs dissolve.

Not proximity

but distance

burns us with love.

MOCKINGBIRD

Nothing whole

is so bold,

we sense. Nothing

not cracked is

so exact and

of a piece. He’s

the distempered

emperor of parts,

the king of patch,

the master of

pastiche, who so

hashes other birds’

laments, so minces