Captivity - Hardcover

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 journals as The New Yorker, 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 2006–7 Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She teaches in the MFA Program at the New School and lives in New York City.

The First RemoveThe 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. It’s 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–The Fourth RemoveThe way sunlight amends The eyes, too, grow practiced in unsteadiness and fracture.I write this to you on air as I walk, but I think now all summary is betrayal. I picture your hands lifting a fork or folding cloth, while at the same timeI’m thinking, it was believed if their cornfields were cut down they would starve and die with hunger, And was missing from and could learn no tidings . . . And they who have taken meWere driven from the little they had . . . he fetched me some water and told me I could wash. All these so braided, where hurt is building nimbly.I feel a pleasure of never contained sweep over me, now that I know place is never Clear or wholly settled, not even the veins on the underside of a leaf, its freedoms.Crossing is a hard simple. The feet register the merest intervals and shifts; All that is tracked is also otherwise and hidden.And water lies plainlyThen I came to an edge of very calm But couldn’t stay there. It was the washed greenblue mapmakers use to indicateInlets 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 wasThough 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 skinsWithout 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 headInto the blue and so unfold there?