Sharks’ Teeth
Everything contains some
silence. Noise gets
its zest from the
small shark’s-tooth-
shaped fragments
of rest angled
in it. An hour
of city holds maybe
a minute of these
remnants of a time
when silence reigned,
compact and dangerous
as a shark. Sometimes
a bit of a tail
or fin can still
be sensed in parks.
—Kay Ryan
As it veers and jags, turning on a sound here, a thought there, Kay Ryan’s “Sharks’ Teeth” is propelled by its own “angled” logic. And by the conjuring power of a phrase: “In this poem the sharks’ teeth are stand-ins for emptiness, with all its excitements,” Ryan says. “Which is to say silence, which resembles sharks’ teeth, is a stand-in for emptiness.” Or it could “herald the start of something.”
“Those connections that interest me tend to be deep swimmers that surface in places where we weren’t looking till they surfaced there,” Ryan writes. “Which is to say, we can be guaranteed of suspense whenever we initiate a thought.”
Kay Ryan served as the 16th U.S. Poet Laureate from 2008 to 2010. In 2011 she won the Pulitzer Prize and was named a MacArthur Fellow. Her newest book, Synthesizing Gravity, Selected Prose, will be out in April from Grove Press. “Sharks’ Teeth,” first published in 2005 in The Niagara River, is reprinted here with permission of the author.
Katherine Hazzard selected this poem for the Independent. She has taught writing on both coasts and lives in Wellfleet.
