Captivity

by Laurie Sheck

     Become what they can’t recover from—leaning over

  Into how they are changed, rough and so tender, nearly all.

  An alien hand

  But what is this mixture of mutiny and stringent peace

     By which I feel, inside myself, the volatile discordance of the world?

  October scatters quietness, burns up the veil of this fierce chemistry, this gravity of atoms.

     As if washed by an alien hand

  My skin grows colder where the mind no longer binds it,

     And then this thinning and widening as of fever,

  And then each eye schooled in tremor and in slash—

  The Eleventh Remove

  Teohare: to be suspended between two different places.

     And yet it seems the remembered home is not one home but clusters

  Of otherwise and absence, reeling, ever-changing. Nor is here one single here.

     How the I constantly crumbles yet still stands.

  We pass south of the river. I count oak trees, birch trees, beech.

  Sync-pulses

  The eye’s language brokenness—

     How it depends on 24 frames per second to sustain the impression of continuous

  Movement on the screen, sync-pulses scanned and quickly mended.

     Slowed any more the seen world will crack and crevice,

  The light become some lawless ragged thing.

     O agile tenderness, I’ve felt the suddenly-narrow of myself break you

  Into flickerings and doubts. The lit screen of me gone wild with shards of never,

     Shockwaves heading like missiles toward what world—

  Audio-waves

  For there are so many forms of opaqueness.

     These sleeper cells plotting and secretive

  Inside me beneath the waves of daily tasks etc.

     And this store-voice saying, How would I know I just work here,

  And the system’s down you’ll have to come back later. Something’s being sold to the highest bidder,

     Something’s being made to go even faster.

  In today’s paper: a newly patented device that compares the audio-waves of an infant’s

     Cry to a data bank of cries. But

  February shreds its stable clarity, and I—

     How frail the and thens are. All the wandering, the errant thefts—

  The Twelfth Remove

  Each thought abducts itself into such wilderness—

     So many footsteps away from, footsteps toward,

  Herself in separateness unsheltered. Every crossing the feeling of a bone caught in the throat

     Yet wed to a most joyful burning. Her leg wound salved with oak leaves

  She heads further toward the promising unsettled, the uncauterized althoughs abiding,

     Leaf-skeins crumbling, tearing.

  That I might step

  Then I came to a peace so random it felt dangerous.

     Rough battlefield, expectancy, most tenuous and fragile contract,

  How can I step with threadbare tenderness

     Across the zero hour of each strike and batter?

  Why do we live in time?—its edges crumbling, its contours filling with monuments,

     Hard data. But there is a very plain in things that sometimes comes

  Just calmly. It holds no trade routes, no borders fortressed, guarded.

     That I may briefly touch it. That I might step into the curious

  Despite—

  So many bending threads

  And now this January whiteness destroys the covered-over of itself.

     O warden’s hand, I’ve felt the press and grasp of you; a starved bitterness that answers.

  That grating of bone against bone. But look how the ground still holds within each warred-against,

     Each roughness, so many bending threads.

  How the cannot unbinds itself, though danger colors it always. Exposed is a place

  Of plural and begin.

  The Thirteenth Remove

  As when the mind separates itself from its extremest places

     Something swerved in me, sealed over. And I must go at their pace, and continue with them

  In so biting a cold, the Norths in me hardening, sun stripped of crown.

     Neither are they safe who lead me.

  You who paint, if you painted us, we are the spots on the canvas left uncovered.

  But there’s another leaf

  Locked within alone, still there are way stations.

     I enclose for you a chestnut fan—

  Each side of it symmetrical, answering to the other. As if a law runs through it, binding.

     But there’s another leaf, the middle one, which belongs to neither one side nor the other.

  So I am cryptic to myself, and ignorant. Once I thought if I lay still enough

  I might feel a heat press into me

     Until it and I were the same element, or dashes on either side of words

  I had forgotten. Matching, unopposed.

     Now, from where I watch, I feel the window, hot with daylight, fill.

  Skin has no choice but to converse with the world.

  Late summer

  Awkward into worldlight I—

     This stammer of me among woods I walk late summer,

  Old logging paths still neatly drawn, pine needles fallen, peat-soft earth,

     Myself all trespass, misunderstanding,

  Translating, translating…

  …

  Such shifting linkages

     Where the grasses bend. The brain’s funerals unfelt inside the soil.

  All the questions in it

     Wordless and apart.

  If I were veiled if I were shuttered in if I were lily root, unspoken, glacial, unapproachable, undone

  If I were trackless, being lost

  If I were iron if I were beggar’s hand if I were leap and canyon bold slashed sky if I were soil

  …

  .Edu.gov.com.mil.org.net.int—

     How well organized it seems,

  This net, this netting,

     Terrain of pathways mapped and taken,

  Whereas I cannot overthrow this stutter in myself

     As a lily knows by code to be a lily

  As the sky carries dangerous ferocities

     Unsettles itself ever

  Thrashes against itself—

     Dashes stammerings tumults lightnings waves—

  …

  Walked the path late summer patched light on the pastureland before the woods began

  I could see through the trees low hills like a delirium of peace such slowness in them and sparrows

  Bluejays three wild turkeys running from the sound of me my clumsy feet in the dry leaves the light

  Neon-green where sun broke over power lines miles of them built in the summer of ’56—

  What consoles does wondering console does finding as when he said I have found now the law of the oak

  Leaves. It is of platter-shaped stars altogether; the leaves lie close like pages. Weeks of walking writing in his

  Notebook then there was no way to shew even whether the flower were shutting or opening—

  …

  There was no way to shew whether the flower were shutting or opening—

  How to know what shuts what opens.

     What consoles does finding console does losing.

  This pastureland all curves and openings leading to farther closings and openings,

     While sentences break in me because I am a thing that breaks.

  At the precise time of day he watched he couldn’t tell

     What the petals were doing, only that a direction
was being taken, a process

  Set in motion,

     Then the pencil tucked inside the knapsack. Then footsteps again, heading back.

  …

  Unaltered, the deepest errors of me.

     I walk the woods’ untamed astrays.

  Such quiet uproar abiding.

     Greenshine over all.

  Red bloom

  To come near but not in is a hardness, a wilderness of far.

     The shadows break but the eye is a stranger to them ever.

  The pulse assembles itself deliberately, casting small nets

     Toward the uncertain. But can a mind in red bloom grow rich with threat and enter?

  On purpose but not, how it must bend and shake, no longer skilled at fixed

     And banished. Then what does it feel like, that raw entering, that leaving,

  Where the end must be different from the beginning?

  This confused manner of the dust

  This confused manner of the dust, of things that mix, must mix,

     As branches extend in wind

  Then lash and shudder back, hitting against themselves, gnarled, sun-bitten, cureless, unconfined.

     Or they turn on themselves, a stern scrutiny. Or grow calm

  But never wholly still, as when leaves, like sensor-chips, register the slightest mutations of air.

  …

  The man in the asylum—

  Did he watch the trees registering wind, dust rising and swirling, settling back?

  “For there is a language of flowers.”

  “For there is a sound reasoning upon all flowers.”

  “For flowers are musical in ocular harmony.”

  He walked out to tend the garden plot allowed him,

  Then, back inside, continued writing—

  O what can words

  The weak interpreters of mortal thoughts…

  Or what can thoughts tho’ wild of wing they rove…

  And, “Winter of all. Be mindful,” This he read in Latin.

  …

  Winter has made of these trees black rips against the sky.

     Clouds rush by, a volatile curelessness. I walk on. The hill so steady,

  Not shredding itself in this wind.

     So many unsettled openings I can’t see. So much crushed beneath

  My awkward feet.

  Winter of all be mindful.

  Wild of wing.

  …

  The wind shifts and then steadies

     But with small breakages the eye can’t see.

  “I want to forget all I know, I am trying to learn what I do not know … the colors that bewilder …”

     O what can words, or what can thoughts…

  Almost all of Smart’s letters were burned;

     Only a handful of business correspondence survives, mainly asking for money.

  No one saw any reason to keep them, those traces of a man

     Who went from asylum to debtor’s prison where he died, praising all things—what falters

  And breaks, what’s humble and minute and harmed:

  “For the mouse is a creature of great personal valour.”

  …

  He thought about the letter “l,” the Hebrew letter Lamed,

     And saw God in this letter.

  “For l is the grain of the human heart & on the network of the skin.”

  “For l is in the veins of all stones both precious and common.”

  “For l is in the grain of wood.”

  But I can find no single letter for these rips of mind that thinking is,

     These strivings of mind so like a hand that crumbles at the moment that it touches—

  Wild of—winter of all—both precious and common—grain of wood.

  …

  Dust rises from the road,

  Ashes of burned letters or the wonderings of mind.

  Once a hand moved across the page, but it is dust from a debtor’s prison, lost.

  Winter of all. Be mindful. Wild of wing.

  There must have been thousands of burned letters; one of the few surviving asks

  For “wished goodness.”

  …

  I think it must be heath-rough, wild, the brain, shocked with its most

     Intricate hesitations, costs.

  Where is the language of flowers? Where the node of fear? A pleasure center

     Flickers. But the place that shreds itself in blackness, the place that wants

  More veil, how it loves its secret

  Heath, its changeling and bewildered

     Kiss, shy on its bewildered hill,

  So quietly scalded, unresolved.

  The slender chromosomal strands

  And then within the cells’ lucid hiddenness, the slender chromosomal strands

     Begin to drift until they touch in random places, recombinant,

  Exchanging. Most cunning of storms, of boundaries altering without threat or terror,

     They seem a form of tenderness, enslaved to no right way,

  No single outcome. Intent

  Is a hard shelter: the gold mask over the Pharaoh’s face, its smile cool

     And unchanging. But how supple the impenitent inner is

  Where I can’t see it, though I carry it in me—

     Where eyes are useless, and thinking, and the sun.

  The Fourteenth Remove

  Suspense carries so many eclipses in it, so many edges of banishment,

     So much curve. Still, I think there is no comfort of mind but in this unmended

  And self-canceling passage. My self-stung eyes lead me awkward and away.

     I can feel no before or after anymore, only how time slips back and forth

  On my skin, stretching out or circling in, cryptic and unticking.

     These woods unlock plainly. Chance roughens what I am. Ransom is a hollow act.

  And water lies plainly

  Then I came to an edge of very calm

     But couldn’t stay there. It was the washed greenblue mapmakers use to indicate

  Inlets and coves, softbroken contours where the land leaves off

     And water lies plainly, as if lamped by its own justice. I hardly know how to say how it was

  Though it spoke to me most kindly,

     Unlike a hard afterwards or the motions of forestalling.

  Now in evening light the far-off ridge carries marks of burning.

     The hills turn thundercolored, and my thoughts move toward them, rough skins

  Without their bodies. What is the part of us that feels it isn’t named, that doesn’t know

     How to respond to any name? That scarcely or not at all can lift its head

  Into the blue and so unfold there?

  Retreating figure

  Always there is a retreating figure

  Dry rocks, a heath, some twigs

  Where authority breaks down experiment escorts us

  Dry rocks then tempest and then rags

  Ragelight and then gradually

  A breaking in the mind like something lashed unlashed

  The mind different then, a river lapping its banks

  No longer insisting it’s only plunge and tremor

  The banks mossy as when softness lures and bewilders the bewildered heart

  …

  Always there is a retreating figure

  The sky unremarkable above it

  The earth radioactive or not, the power lines buzzing or not

  Phones in each of the houses or phones not yet invented

  Or phones already obsolete

  It’s hard to walk for so long year in year out but the figure walks it walks

  Is it blind has it a stick has it a daughter

  Somewhere the built world going on about its business
<
br />   Somewhere buildings crowding ever closer

  …

  Always there is a retreating figure

  (But my skin is almost nothing now, a tapestry of doubts, a tablet evanescing)

  All around it the quiet bedlam of each fact

  What’s conclusive or not, newly proven or not

  Then the conclusions contradicted, the conclusions revised or thrown away

  What does it want where is it going

  Its feet registering the unevenness of earth

  (If there were an otherwise in me, if I could feel a clean extinction)

  Bare rocks up ahead bare rocks behind it

  And in its ears the heavy silence of the balance sheets, the tallies

  Then the ledgers tearing

  The ledgers burning free

  Doesn’t govern the perplexities

  For I have come to see I must live at some distance

     From convinced, from the sense of finding, being found, such rightness

  As bears in upon the mind