Michael Ryan

When did I learn the word "I"?
What a mistake. For some,
it may be a placeholder,
for me it's a contagion.
...

At four o'clock it's dark.
Today, looking out through dusk
at three gray women in stretch slacks
chatting in front of the post office,
...

The ward beds float like ghost ships
in the darkness, the nightlight
above my bed I pretend is a lighthouse
with a little man inside who wears
...

They slept and ate like us.
Feral they were not.
The intricacy of their handiwork
bespoke a fineness we'd be taught.
...

The love we've defined for ourselves
in privacy, in suffering,
keeps both of us lonely as a fist,
but does intimacy mean a happy ending?
...

What kind of delusion are you under?
The life he hid just knocked you flat.
You see the lightning but not the thunder.
...

Most of the past is lost,
and I'm glad mine has vanished
into blackness or space or whatever nowhere
what we feel and do goes,
...

On the day a fourteen-year-old disappeared in Ojai, California,
having left a Christmas Eve slumber party barefoot
to "go with a guy" in a green truck,
...

They're all dressed up in carmine
floor-length velvet gowns, their upswirled hair
festooned with matching ribbons:
their fresh hopes and our fond hopes for them
...

From embarrassment, I made statements.
My icons—tight caves and mouths—stuck together
briefly like dry lips, like a lover's insults.
The fact is they were ugly to all of us.
...

For John Skoyles
My daughter made drawings with the pens you sent,
line drawings that suggest the things they represent,
different from any drawings she — at ten — had done,
...

habit smacks
its dull skull
like a stuck bull
in a brick stall
...

The birds were louder this morning,
raucous, oblivious, tweeting their teensy bird-brains out.
It scared me, until I remembered it's Spring.
...

Who are you
long legged
woman in my dream
kissing me open mouthed
...

My sick heart and my sick soul
I'd gladly fasten in a bag
and drop into an ocean-hole
to float in darkness as a rag.
...

It shows up one summer in a greatcoat,
storms through the house confiscating,
says it must be paid and quickly,
says it must take everything.
...

The dead thing mashed into the street
the crows are squabbling over isn't
her, nor are their raucous squawks
the quiet cawing from her throat
...

Torment by appetite
is itself an appetite
dulled by inarticulate,
dogged, daily
...

The rich little kids across the street
twist their swings in knots. Near me,
on the porch, wasps jazz old nesting tunes
and don't get wild over human sweat.
...

After the earth finally touches the sun,
and the long explosion stops suddenly
like a heart run down,
the world might seem white and quiet
...