Sheck - Captivity

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF Copyright 2007 by Laurie Sheck All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto. www.aaknopf.com Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Harvard University Press: Excerpt from The Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H.

Johnson (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press). Copyright 1958, 1986 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright 1914, 1924, 1932, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright 1952 by Alfred Leete Hampson. Copyright 1960 by Mary L. Hampson.

Reprinted by permission of Harvard University Press. Harvard University Press and the Trustees of Amherst College: Excerpts from Experiment escorts us last and No rack can torture me from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press). Copyright 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Reprinted by permission of Harvard University Press and the Trustees of Amherst College. New Directions Publishing Corp.: Excerpt from Sappho: Fragment #24 from 7 Greeks by Guy Davenport.

Copyright 1995 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sheck, Laurie.
Captivity / Laurie Sheck.I
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-49434-4
I. Title.
PS 3569 H 3917 C 37 2007
81154dc22 2006026935 v3.1 J.L.P. In sickness and in health

This homesickness of mind Like cuts made almost tenderly in flesh.

The surfaces of things grown slow and Dangerous Beneath the desire to apprehend. September light I cannot hear your quiet. So much elsewhere unsettling each surface, so much annulled.

White sky and such intervals of quiet. How even the most still-seeming thing rushes through itself and isnt final. Waves. Waves.

Nor can I compute the possible. In my most careful calculations, I am the automaton holding out her bells, Raising and lowering her fists to a measured, steady ticking. But there is a cast-apart In me that marks no hour, and its hands hold no bells at all, The seconds slant and coarse with split-asunder.

The others hiding away when they took her. Eventually I learned other words. Assere for knives.

Toras: North. Satewa: alone. Always a breakdown of systems that will not be restored. Something cuts itself in me. Its not a question of refusal. Esteronde: to rain.

Tesenochte: I do not know. The shattered of, and then the narrowness opening where the vanished touches it Then how the mind recombines and overthrows

Thinking has a quiet skin. But I feel the break and fled of things inside it, Blue hills most gentle in calm light, then stretches of assail And ransack. Such tangles of charred wreckage, shrapnel-bits Singling and singeing where they fall. I feel the stumbling gait of what I am, The quiet uproar of undone, how to be hidden is a tempting, violent thing Each thought breaking always in another, All the unlawful elsewheres rushing in. The mornings raw and wet.

Theres something delicate and fierce that comes damagingly out of the mind When the bodys ill. I feel the invisible boundaries of my life strike into me From regions I cant see, as when red sky assails itself After intervals of blue, whiteshine, dullish gray. I sense crimson strokes at the edges of things And have burnt inside myself so many words in a bonfire Unseeable but real as dirt. The worst fault a thing can have is unreality. Here is a window, here a chair. The air swirls with severity and Hazard.

The chair is white-painted pine, peeling in places, and carved with a five-petalled flower.

Frost, then ridged snow. The body cant rest when its in pain. Outside: hills closed as the cells glass secrecies, Waste spaces etched and fissured with genetic script. Why should their meanings be clear? Such bold disconsolates In them, and the tendings, the dividings. The mind would pierce them, Being scared.

Now on my arm, chopped angled shadows; And how they enter the eye with their sense of breakage, their sense of outlaw And estrange.

Im now in careful hands; I have some fever. Something striking sideways and unlooked-for pierces yet this may be so delicate. Before falling ill I saw elms in small leaf, purple orchis, cowslips, streaks Of brilliant electrum. An extremity of mind concealed grows anxious to Become. The present fury is ash.

Still, note The water coming through a lock. Note green wheat. Its lucent. Perhaps It has a chrysoprase bloom.

Was taken by. And the rest scattered.

ExtremityPlanting itself in me until I am most Northerly and lostall tundra-cold whiteness and mistrust. Winter-taught, ignorant, unsolved. Daylight in its first and narrowest pulses. Reddish sky. This noiselessness in mind-space. What does astray look like, and what is the sound of capture, The sound of breaking free? Her footsteps moving off into snow-deeps and never-to-come.

The never-returned of her, smoke from a way station burned down. And thus she continued. And thus in minds secret, and in so bitter a cold.

All the more rare and wilder In storms of otherwise and then again fettered, I feel my mind disfiguring itself as if it could not in any other way approach The withering, the frightened back of things, the buoyancy crushed. Today the fasting girl Died. Four nurses were sent to watch over her But couldnt cross to where she had installed within herself the darkest field.

Like someone watching trees, they couldnt turn with her turnings. I wonder at that country She belonged to, the obligation of not, the eye-blur restlessly steering. Its December, Almost dark at 3:00. They moistened her lips with water as the redness left, The skin of a white tiger. She had an air of the knights of chess about her. Something bitter distills where we cant see.

It is hard to seize what is.

December night. The north winds shift above the icy hill; How they move like an unfinished sentence always, wave-like and varying, And I think they are beautiful this way, where nothing can explain, And the green of the near lies altered and effaced by snow. This