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Photo (c) Nina Subin |
Circuits
Again the dark begins to meddle with the buildings,
first softening then releasing them
that they might fold themselves back into concealment,
while the silences wander, inexhaustible, diverse,
hovering like shame and not like shame,
dispersing over neon-shattered streets.
But the programmed air is purposeful and sure; it doesn't wander.
It carries a deliberateness inside it,
a brittleness like wooden boxes.
In my neighbor's room, electronic voices soothe him,
and bodies made of an uncertain light
that pass back and forth through brief episodic disclosures.
No microbes live in them, or stenches--only a blue glow.
Each night they become their own erasures.
The circuits that guide me are smaller than I know.
What gaunt liberty this is, this waiting for headlines,
the flesh drenched in hearsay,
or the distant, lovely algebra of stars,
the offer that is good for one week only.
Outside, the raw data of the faces pass.
Someone is tearing a photograph in thirds. Someone
is laughing. Someone is stockpiling rage,
sharp words about to burst into the throat.
Where is the soundtrack? Where the poison dress to sting me clean?
How quiet chaos is. How tracelessly it enters.
Excerpted from Black Series. Copyright© 2001 by Laurie Sheck. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf. All rights reserved. No part of this poem may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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From the Book of Persephone (VI)
Grass fronds, leaves in wind. The light smooth
and then shattering. There are fragments, shards,
distortions of shadows, birds.
(I am distant from myself I watch myself shatter.)
Beautiful light, sunlight on branches, on water, I think,
and lilies, crocuses, poppies, wild roses,
birds, grass, grass, water--
But they are gone from me now, those things,
Now there is only this distance from the world.
(So this is how the skin flares up into bitterness,
this fear like toxic waste,
this numbness rubbing its oils into my palms.)
First there was sunlight, then darkness, then this farness
sifting down onto my skin: my skin listening, each pore of me
listening. There was a dream in which a fire burned
And then the dream of mourning.
Once upon a . . . once upon a time . . . then nothing.
I am under the Well of the Beautiful dances,
under the stiff sheets of fallen leaves.
Above me they are dancing--the girls with bridal veils
and the children spilling their baskets
Of loosestrife and dried grass. They are twirling bright scarves
and long white capes. The earth they dance on
has grown barren: no barley, wasted fields.
Someday I think I will go back there
but how will I believe in my own skin, what it can touch, what it can know?
This dream of skin, this scorched enchanted dream.
What is belonging? Into what does the dream vanish when we waken?
Where is its hiding place? Where is the ghost of its waking on my skin?
Excerpted from The Willow Grove. Copyright© 1996 by Laurie Sheck. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf. All rights reserved. No part of this poem may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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