`One Foot Will Lift and the Split Resolve'

One splits hairs, atoms, rails and infinitives. One splits and splices genes. Splitting implies sharing and breaking, leaving and taking. In Shakespeare, it’s the heart or breast most often split. In King Lear, the Duke of Albany says: “Let sorrow split my heart if ever I / Did hate thee, or thy father!” The word entered English around Shakespeare’s sixteenth birthday. Slangily, to split is to leave the scene, divorce or perform gymnastics. We split tickets, screens and the difference. Kay Ryan has a new poem, “Splitting Ice,” at The Threepenny Review:

“Like standing
on splitting ice
one foot on one
one on the
other piece.
Distressed like
the family of man
at the divorce
of the plates:
some cast into
a suddenly new
world as though
having sinned;
those kept behind
trapped and
bereft. But in
a person, one
foot will lift
and the split
resolve. So
why do the
self-saved
feel half left?”

“Plates” suggests dinnerware and tectonics. Families and continents split. The religious resonance is new to Ryan’s poems – “as though having sinned,” “self-saved.” The rupturing of a family, like Eliza and little Harry braving ice floes on the Ohio River, is perilous and painful. Masters split slave families. Alone, Ryan suggests, we survive splits: “one / foot will lift / and the split / resolve.” Of course, wholeness has a price: we, the “self-saved,” feel “half left.” Another California poet who lived in the neighborhood of the San Andreas Fault, Janet Lewis, writes in “Morning Devotion”:

“To bind despair and joy
Into a stable whole.”