Monday Poems: "A Certain Kind of Eden" -- by Kay Ryan

It seems like you could, but

you can’t go back and pull

the roots and runners and replant.

It’s all too deep for that.

You’ve overprized intention,

have mistaken any bent you’re given

for control. You thought you chose

the bean and chose the soil.

You even thought you abandoned

one or two gardens. But those things

keep growing where we put them—

if we put them at all.

A certain kind of Eden holds us thrall.

Even the one vine that tendrils out alone

in time turns on its own impulse,

twisting back down its upward course

a strong and then a stronger rope,

the greenest saddest strongest

kind of hope.

*     *     *     *     *

Kay Ryan is the author of several books of poetry, including Flamingo Watching (2006), The Niagara River (2005), and Say Uncle (2000). Her book The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (2010) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Ryan has won awards from from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She served from 2008-2010 as the   sixteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She was born in San Jose, California, and has lived in Marin County, California, since 1971.