Laurie Sheck

[from Laurie Sheck's Captivity, 2007]

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.


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. Each move leads
       into

Ambush and undone.


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 —

Captivity