by Laurie Sheck
[ ] to sing [ ]
[ ] a storm wind [ ]
[ ] and no pain [ ]
What survives is mutilated, torn—on scraps of papyrus
Used to mummify crocodiles, on pottery shards.
It’s the brackets that I’ve grown to love; how they don’t banish the lostness
But give voice and space to absence, blanks.
As now, the curtains pulsing over the open window
Make of it a lost, unsettled place
Between the solid fields of wall.
…
When I felt my mind tear, words flared in it like electric light, like currents buzzing.
It had brackets in it surrounding things I couldn’t see
And the brackets were locked gates
At each end of a field I couldn’t enter. Some days there were many such fields,
On other days just few. The brackets were rigid, of a silvery quality,
Surrounded by a redblack air.
A bracket will not allow dissection.
I peered through them to the space I couldn’t enter. Quiet field without possession.
No scar-trace or word-trace I could see.
…
If I closed my book in the lamplight (the others sleeping, the rough sound of their breathing)
Would I find the poem of my nightblack field,
And would it look like this?—
[ ]
the wayfarer
silent hidden
[indecipherable]
unreachable
[ ]
what loves.
…
In the newspaper the diagram of the human genome
Looked true the way photos of the moon look true, the way drawings of neurons,
All flaying, reaching tentacles and readiness seem true. So much busyness
And struggle, then nothing for a while, then the intense
Attentiveness, elemental, a body needs to become for a time unvanishing,
Repeating itself through the world.
This is what’s inside of us, I thought. How strange, this landscape of inside.
Still, such lost places in my mind when I think of it—
[indecipherable]
unreachable
[ ]
[ ] what
loves.
The Fifth Remove
Sometimes a bare peace, a restoration.
Too much veil in me, she thinks, if otherness is to sift further in,
And must sift further in. Reason is a fragile wing.
But I must cross and cross over even so. Far into otherwise and fractured,
The irreconcilable estrangement of me breaking.
Why must the mind cover itself why hide itself why bind itself in quiet and in dark—
What is this chain
And became very cold, coiled back,
The articulations vanishing. Inside me a bold stretch of blue scattering away,
Then burnt white.
What is this chain of feelings by which we mean (if it is that) a self?
A thing of more or less opacity, depending. Still, I’ve seen a red that does not mean,
I’ve seen blue shadow, and structures most definite in their carvings
As if no further correctness could be wished them.
For every cliff and limb and edge
Skeined in the afternoon and threatening
There is a rinsing tenderness, and I am held here, and so met and accidented
By perhaps.
Unlike the winged recoil
Many thanks for your letter.
The other day we were given vaccinations, but one of us already stood apart,
His entire face and arms marked by the smallpox, and on his neck a star-clump like singed
Nerves, or spidery white kisses. Seeing him, I felt something strike at me, inside me, impale its
Chisel there, unlike the winged recoil of the violet’s leaves.
And then the earthline wavered, a grimace briefly shadowsharp and fractured.
Bitter north wind, hail and sleet. I grow flexible and mingled.
Shock brings with it a silent conviction of wonder.
Comfort binds itself
Thinking is a truceless act.
How it holds the injured yets and thens inside it, so many layers of barter
And resist. You who are all swerve,
Distance and blindfold when I try to find you—
Why did you plant in us, within our very cells,
Such stinging cuts and tense pleasures born of wars; each chaotic
Torn-away and knotted freedom?
Comfort binds itself restless and apart:
The yes disfigured, then the power of its tracing flame.
A crisp whiteness
For I have missed the feeling of being able to go somewhere else,
Delicately barred as I am
In this slow conversion of myself into nothingness—
It’s as if all that visits the mind
Is a great fire on an altar but I stand before it and am cold. I watch rich folds
Of sky and feel how my eyes fail, trying to adjust, take hold—there are after-images, astigmatism,
Irradiation, such movements of accommodation and convergence
As I can barely comprehend, yet they are mine. Through this glare of self-distrust and longing
I sense in the distance a crisp whiteness
But it’s roughed overall with my wrong articulations, apprehensions,
And so is darked.
The Sixth Remove
Fog gowning the hill, then slashed to burning.
Into this far and barely-marked inside my mind I seek you, protector,
But you are quiet, undisclosed. I feel the kind topography of wind, its shapes
Cool and inhuman. Want them ever closer.
Have you broken apart in your far-from-here, your always-absence, have you
Shattered to burnt galaxies of atoms? How does one call to that which is not?—Yet even so—
Rope-burn
Maybe there is in silence a remoter tenderness,
Uncharted peace most delicate and threatened. But I feel the rope-burn’s dizzying mystery on me
Always, the long scald of it pressing on the captive’s wrists. Such parched riverbeds
It carves there, such raw breakage of suppose and comfort.
How can the mind caught up in fright not harm itself, not dream the killing-parties
Ever? Not be lost in this thick wilderness of branchings
Where it feels the brutal never,
Stinging bond.
Did not foresee
The mind is a thing deeply marked. I have bound myself to this damage.
Most delicate and difficult
Strangeness, I have abandoned the idea of being
Warm. There’s a strictness in the ice charged with its distinct breakages,
Hard and beautifully detached—water once so blue polished to a sheen until it’s heightened
And unlike itself.
Outside, cold hills. The sky steel-colored, then duller in parts, the gray of smudged newsprint.
I did not foresee
How this becoming is a reckless and incautious thing. The ice
Grows intricate where the stresses fall.
No summer as yet
And no summer as yet, but it will come with its bright pieces of whatever,
Sorted by the eye yet still uncaptured,
Greenly branched and various with promise. I’d like to watch it long enough,
Held fast by the laws of its sequencing
s and shapings, and be so carried, the way the mind goes in
Search of an after that will temper what has come before,
Or sometimes not—: Did I tell you of the man I visited last week, who hasn’t lost the ability
To move his tongue, his lips, to laugh or cry or sing or use his voice, yet is unable
To utter any words, just a few unintelligible syllables,
And recognizing this, stares into the fact of it
As at the eggs in an opened anthill? I don’t know how to think of him. We are so rawly made,
So carried into the harsh and almost-dark.
As if stung in the throat. As if seared by a narrow wire-like blaze
Sharply upon the air and always.
Or resolve into a calm
For there is so much crumbling and instead. I think of you now writing that last
Note. How the aparts multiply, grow wild with clash and scatter. Or resolve into a calm
I can barely understand—a wasp’s nest, maybe, the papery regularity of its cells,
All those steady carefuls lining up. Your thin, your brittle wrist, gave back
Its weight, its mass, its shadow—but to what? And now, in me, the far of your death
Sternly whitens the notion of to see. You, now, not singular, but interspersed
Among the questions,
Elsewheres of water rushing down stone steps.
The Seventh Remove
But how each thought hacks and scalds itself
As if there were no settlement to return to anymore,
Jealous of the sweeping rain and in night-season cold under it.
I went on foot and careless. She, who once was traded for a gun. She, led away into Removes.
The cut thread of her, the and with bitterness I carried…And then nothing but wilderness,
And being taken by, and a sorrow that cannot.
No purchase
I’ve come far North.
The ice insists like a vast inexplicable tenderness of being, or an inquiry
For which there is no answer. This white far has no purchase but itself,
Ignites itself plainly. Doesn’t think what boundaries of or lacking food or shelter.
Doesn’t think, What claim, what passage through, what profit, what contract, what frenzy of dissection.
The brutal unsolved is a stark liberty.
Matter has no ideal to pursue. I drift out from the sole inlet of to know.
As when an otherwise opens
Now December strikes in with its own brittleness, as when an otherwise
Opens in the body, wrenching further into slant and hazard.
Past the covert operations of the state, past checkpoints and official access,
A crystal splits along the lines of its own cleavage.
Questions unshelter themselves harshly. Each war-zone of them flaring, and radical with damage.
The Eighth Remove
But suppose is very fragile and away.
Now, among the oaks and walnut trees, threat builds in me a tenser, riven place.
I feel it press against my ribs, the steeps in it and thievery; what’s gentle crumbles
Into guardedness and shards. Our provisions now are groundnuts, acorns, purslane, weeds.
Hunger’s made of me a spy of comfort. For I have passed very quickly from to own.
Maelstroms
Trees bending, shockwaves of mind. Tender maelstroms
Of astray and sunder. And shudderings of late summer light on the hill
As when hurt pathways of thought
Become habitable scars, strange comfort of roughness, hectic-calm.
No captions beneath them, no marketing director saying, “Our job is to make people
Buy things they don’t need or want.”
How secretive the brain is. So many banishments inside it, so much sting.
I watch the leaf-darks sway among the lit ones,
Cureless in their turnings, flicks of wind.
The cells in their distant otherness
But there are so many thresholds in the body.
The cells in their distant otherness inside me. As if I stood beside them blinded,
Their script unbrailled, an iron away in them, a veiling,
As when computer files won’t open though they’re called up by their codes,
A glitch in the system keeping them separate and unknown.
There is no clarifying edge.
Watchfulness is a weak captive of itself.
Mysteriously standing
All the fiercer and lawlessly irregular
These intervals of withdrawal where I am a burned field
And above me the sky is thickening and clouding.
In that field, little Stonehenge of the heart
Mysteriously standing, its distinct construction odd and uninjured in this yellow
Light. If I say I was flexible, was harmed, was cleansed, was helped, was deeply marked,
I still can’t understand what I have been. Doubt falls in me falls through me
A rough and intricate hazard. The mind carries an austere
Inwardness that will not put out its eyes.
The Ninth Remove
Every day in another language.
As when we passed the hill where one of their villages once prospered.
Not of tents, but of wooden houses arranged in a manner of streets much like our own.
Many had perished there of smallpox.
An apart pierces and yet at times I cross a dark most near them. I’ve been a long time now
From walls, that grip of certain.
There are such vanishings inside each quiet. So many plurals and veerings, so much away—
As waxen cells imprinted
And then inwardly each question presses hard
Against the curious hollows and the sharp and yets. It’s what I felt that first
Frigid winter when the early carefulness
Crumbled (that new land)—and then the long afterwards began—
Of snow mounding on the overhangs of roofs pocked as waxen cells
Imprinted with the marks of bees’ jaws. And the questions rising in me, too,
Were those rough marks, precise irregularities
From which I knew I must set out—
Into the insteads, into the odd (and yet I must) and roadless to the eye
And curved and steep and coarse and keenly branching.
This white unswaying place
I’m sorry not to have written you sooner.
We are peculiar forms, like someone’s old papers rifled quickly through
But not read before the burning.
How to speak of the icy cave-like place I lately feel,
Its white reluctance dividing me from all things I desire and see.
I think it must often be the case
That one holds within oneself a guardedness, expectant, steeply quarried,
The way mistakes grow magnified inside the mind, spiked and sharply gleaming.
How skilled, how dominant, this white unswaying place.
And I wonder how, bred from our churning, it constructs itself so strongly
Like the crush of light I sometimes at the noonhour hear.
A ragged fabric
And then the mind begins to starve itself. As if the brain clefts were giving back their networks,
All their tensile webs. Unsafe the worldspeed and the scalded
Warnings. Quiet as errors in genetic script
Or handcuffs left rusting on a table, the folds and softs
Are vanished from the air. Shock knits a ragged fabric. Ea
ch move leads into
Ambush and undone.
The Tenth Remove
Morning light unsealing over the river. Widening sky.
Such an odd species we are that locks itself up, or locks itself in from within.
Wardened and opposed. The eyes are such curious creatures and yet. Tempted, drawing back.
There are now thirty of us sick, and deaths among us daily. May 7th, Sarah Lydle, whose name was Braint
When she was taken, and who married during this our captivity, died, and on the 13th, Mr. Smead’s son Daniel
Died, and Christian Tether on the 14th. I am grown very weak. The prison is made of stone and lime.
Hazard wanders over itself, charts and marks its own body. Excisions. Deletions.
In the sky, so much of further, so much of lost.
Each view intercepted
Like the fretting of blades closing
I feel a sense of my own disappearing as it rises inside me. How hot it grows,
Tin-bright then notched like the river in torrent; breaks in the rocks are dark eyes.
The sky behind me reclines like an Egyptian king,
Gold-edged and final.
Inside has odd ways: so much cutting away
In the thinking of, in each view intercepted by instead, the sharpened bolts
Of looking back. I’m releasing into shadows I can’t know. Tall larches by the river
