3/03/2021

visited but not carried away

Experience has proven that it is impossible to give away secrets. Even when I write them down as clearly as I can, people seem to receive another secret, which is secret from me. I like that. And that's not all: my own secrets can become secret from me again. Which is to say, having exposed them as best I can - in a poem, say - the secrets remain there, to be visited but not carried away. Is it as though I had never whispered them, I am so little changed by what the poem knows. 

 - Kay Ryan, from her essay "Derichment" in Synthesising Gravity: Selected Prose.

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