Taken Lightly

"How can lightness insist? I don't know why lightness isn't talked about, more valued, more pursued in poetry. I suspect it is out of the fear that one will be 'taken lightly.' But I ask, is there a sensation more exquisite than the feeling of having the burden of oneself borne off by a poem? The burden only, note; not the self. One's atoms are mysteriously distanced from one another. That is to say, one still has all one's atoms, but for the moment they are not the trouble they were."

~ Kay Ryan

 

The Edges of Time by Kay Ryan

It is at the edges
that time thins.
Time which had been
dense and viscous
as amber suspending
intentions like bees
unseizes them. A
humming begins,
apparently coming
from stacks of
put–off things or
just in back. A
racket of claims now,
as time flattens. A
glittering fan of things
competing to happen,
brilliant and urgent
as fish when seas
retreat.