Slow and Steady, This Poem Will Win Your Heart

The turtle’s track may be “graceless,” but within its carapace the poem is lithe and limber.

If you broke the lines another way, you might unlock some sprightly couplets.

These rhymes and near-rhymes don’t plod; they dance, with a slow and steady elegance.

The last lines, which seem to fix the turtle in her earthbound essence, also push in the opposite direction.

The presence of the word “wings” — even naming something that the turtle can’t imagine — stirs up an idea of flight. We might remember that, according to current biological thinking, turtles are more closely related to birds than they are to many other reptiles.

The phrase “sport of … things,” meanwhile, teases the ear with “sport of kings,” the traditional name for horse-racing. Could this turtle be a thoroughbred, tracing her lineage back to Aesop’s champion racer?

Her endurance of daily frustrations and indignities may depend on deep camouflage. She is unlucky, unenviable, unassuming, and also, secretly, the opposite of those things.

I’m not saying she’s a shell-y skylark, soaring when it looks as if she’s trudging, transcending her terrestrial nature. She can only be a turtle. Which it turns out is pretty complicated.

Because even as this poem is about what it’s like to be a turtle, it’s also about what it’s like for a turtle to be a metaphor. And — you could say therefore — about how looking at (or as) a turtle illuminates what it’s like to be a person, a woman, a poet.

Ryan is a poet who favors sideways, surprising, puzzle-worthy wordplay. She also writes a lot about animals, and, almost always obliquely, about her own experience. I hesitate to call “Turtle” a self-portrait, or a poem about poetry. But then again …

Look one more time at the last entry in the catalog of ordinary human stuff that the turtle’s shell is compared to: pottery.

Discard one letter, and flip two others.

Poetry: the only wings our humble species knows, or needs.