New Kay Ryan

I've been reading the new Kay Ryan book, The Niagara River. It's her usual stuff: short, narrow, epigrammatic poems, in the vein of Emily Dickinson. Here's one:


Backward Miracle

Every once in a while
we need a
backward miracle
that will strip language,
make it hold for
a minute: just the
vessel with the
wine in it —
a sacramental
refusal to multiply,
reclaiming the
single loaf
and the single
fish thereby.


I love how this poem is so simple on the surface, yet if you begin to burrow into it a whole world of ideas opens: language, meaning, hermeneutics, religion, a return to prime origins. I love it.