by Laurie Sheck
The way sun defines branches and leaves, singling them plainly.
In storms of mostly-over
I am air entangling with itself, or the palm of a hand on a table lightly drawing off the dust
From something fled or buried away.
How scarcely or not at all discernable, the ways the mind seeks to comfort itself
But doesn’t govern the perplexities of shadow
That hold it fast. I can’t think of altering anything. Rough this injuring by which we learn
The might of things that strike us, and April now blossoming
Into the rips and suddenness of silver light.
The Fifteenth Remove
Today we waded over the Banquang river, so cold.
I remember when I used to sleep quietly without workings in my thoughts.
I know now that I am and have been a careless creature.
O Banker, Self, I feel your rigid calculations. How careful you are,
Tallying your savings and loans, keeping track of each balance sheet and ledger.
But beneath those computations, what terror of cast-away is there
In you, what rough disordered stricknenness and error?
What merciless rearrangement and away?
This green, this blueness
How strong it is this green, this blueness,
And doesn’t dim now but brightens,
Gathering and discharging over the troubled headland
Of the self. Sometimes what you look at hard seems to look hard at you.
Even as the skin below my eyes gradually hollows and softens, I see glowing edges
On the mountains that aren’t stalled or lodged in struggle with the mind.
I feel wind like the tearing of cloth, and stand in the accidental strokes of this
Disordered field, its crossings and taperings, which move through me and across me
And so knit.
The Sixteenth Remove
And having no lodging but the cold
We move through damage and cleanse, through the manifesting no’s
And sometimes gently. These eyes, though armed with watching, seem of little power to me now,
Like hunting empty-handed. How I’m owned by that which will not answer.
Property of ______. Inhabitant of ______. I think now it was always so.
Torn shawl of the unsettled wraps me. Name is an odd careful and a flaw.
All the labels of me burn. Away has many layers of begin.
The Seventeenth Remove
But if there were to be a rescue, a return, I am pluralled now, and stranger.
What sovereignty is left in me but these brisk or delicate warrings, rogue-states
Splintering, unchaining. Storms feed on themselves, becoming their own captors
And protectors both. Clash releases an odd tenderness.
Comfort hides its barbed and yet.
We cross it is so cold the first frost has fallen we rest we cook we talk continue on.
NOTES
Some of these poems involve interactions with Gerard Manley Hopkins’s journals, notebooks, and letters. They contain word-clusters and some sentences from those works, and a few pieces are based on incidents he recounted. Other texts drawn upon include the writings of William James and Ralph Waldo Emerson. In “Genome” the translated Greek passage is from Guy Davenport’s translation of Sappho’s fragment 24 in 7 Greeks.
The Removes series draws on American captivity narratives, while not strictly limiting itself to that context or story line. It incorporates language from those accounts, including those by Elizabeth Hanson, Nehemiah How, Mary Rowlandson, and Hannah Swarnton. The term “Remove” can be found in Mary Rowlandson’s narrative: she divides her captive journey, beginning on the 10th of February 1676 and ending on April 12th of that same year, into Nineteen Removes.
The phrase “clockwork prayer” is from the artist Elizabeth King. The poem in which it appears is dedicated to her.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My gratitude to the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard for the Fellowship year during which I completed this book. Thanks as well to all those who read and commented on the manuscript. I am particularly grateful to Deb Garrison.
I would also like to thank the editors of the magazines in which some of these poems first appeared, sometimes in slightly different versions. All the poems, except for the Removes, originally appeared simply under the title “Poem”; they are identified here by the phrase-titles they carry in this book:
Crowd: “This green, this blueness,” “Yet this may be so delicate”
Harvard Review: “Tossed-back,” “No clockwork prayer,” “A crisp whiteness,” “And water lies plainly,” “So many bending threads,” “The Sixth Remove” (originally titled “Poem”), “A quiet skin,” “Uncharted peace”
The Iowa Review: “But couldn’t cross,” “Did not foresee,” “No summer as yet”
Pool: “As when red sky,” “This white unswaying place”
TriQuarterly: “The First Remove,” “The Second Remove,” “The Fifth Remove” (originally published as “The Third Remove”), “The Seventh Remove” (originally published as “The Fourth Remove”), “The Fourteenth Remove” (originally published as “The Fifth Remove”)
Verse: “September light,” “Maelstroms”
The Hunterdon Museum of Art also printed [And water lies plainly] in its catalogue Correspondences: Poetry and Contemporary Art, to accompany the exhibit of the same name (October 12, 2003–January 4, 2004), in which this poem appeared.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laurie Sheck is the author of four previous books of poetry, including Black Series and The Willow Grove, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work appears widely in such publications as The New Yorker and journals such as The Kenyon Review, Verse, and Boston Review. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation, Sheck has also been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and is a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library for 2006–7. She teaches in the MFA Program at the New School and lives in New York City.
ALSO BY LAURIE SHECK
Black Series
The Willow Grove
Io at Night
Amaranth
