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.
PS3569 H3917C37 2007
811’54—dc22 2006026935
v3.1
J.L.P.
In sickness and in health
Captivity is Consciousness—
So’s Liberty.
—Emily Dickinson,
from Poem #384
“We thank thee Oh Father” for these strange Minds, that enamor us against thee.
—Emily Dickinson
in a letter to Mrs. T. W. Higginson,
LATE SUMMER 1876
…chance left free to act falls into an order as well as purpose.
—Gerard Manley Hopkins,
from his journal,
FEBRUARY 24, 1873
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
September light
No hour
The First Remove
A quiet skin
As when red sky
The mind would pierce them
Yet this may be so delicate
The Second Remove
But couldn’t cross
Hidden liberty
How oddly lawful
The Third Remove
Expeditions
Tossed-back
No clockwork prayer
This austere and fierce machinery
The Fourth Remove
And soon scattering
Genome
The Fifth Remove
What is this chain
Unlike the winged recoil
Comfort binds itself
A crisp whiteness
The Sixth Remove
Rope-burn
Did not foresee
No summer as yet
Or resolve into a calm
The Seventh Remove
No purchase
As when an otherwise opens
The Eighth Remove
Maelstroms
The cells in their distant otherness
Mysteriously standing
The Ninth Remove
As waxen cells imprinted
This white unswaying place
A ragged fabric
The Tenth Remove
Each view intercepted
An alien hand
The Eleventh Remove
Sync-pulses
Audio-waves
The Twelfth Remove
That I might step
So many bending threads
The Thirteenth Remove
But there’s another leaf
Late summer
Red bloom
This confused manner of the dust
The slender chromosomal strands
The Fourteenth Remove
And water lies plainly
Retreating figure
Doesn’t govern the perplexities
The Fifteenth Remove
This green, this blueness
The Sixteenth Remove
The Seventeenth Remove
NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A Note About the Author
Other Books by This Author
September light
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.
No hour
White sky and such intervals of quiet.
How even the most still-seeming thing rushes through itself and isn’t final.
Particles. 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 First Remove
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. 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—
A quiet skin
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.
As when red sky
The morning’s raw and wet.
There’s something delicate and fierce that comes damagingly out of the mind
When the body’s ill. I feel the invisible boundaries of my life strike into me
From regions I can’t 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.
The mind would pierce them
Frost, then ridged snow.
The body can’t rest when it’s 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.
Yet this may be so delicate
I’m 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. It’s lucent. Perhaps
It has a chrysoprase bloom.
The Second Remove
Was taken by. And the rest scattered. Extremity
Planting itself in me until I am most Northerly and lost—all 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 mind’s secret, and in so bitter a cold.
But couldn’t cross
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 couldn’t cross to where she had installed within herself the darkest field.
Like someone watching trees, they couldn’t turn with her turnings. I wonder at that country
She belonged to, the obligation of not, the eye-blur restlessly steering. It’s 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 can’t see.
It is hard to seize what is.
Hidden liberty
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 now has little of its own—the winds inside it from far off
Where once the trees had leaves. I don’t want to be warm. I don’t want a marble
Calm. Branches click like hair triggers, and the ground refuses ownership,
Each hidden liberty soundless, undisclosed.
How oddly lawful
I stayed behind, unable to sense any center to things anymore.
Yet how oddly lawful in itself it seemed and sometimes graceful—
That place in me like water clouded-over or the blanked gray of a computer screen candescing.
The way it wouldn’t break itself, nor allow any thinnings or openings,
An ancient kingdom risen whole and ruthless from the sea.
I was its Emperor, irrelevant, deposed.
So often in the eyes a shocked tenderness. But where does it go, over
That gray water, that gray land?
The Third Remove
Swamps and thickets. Nothing but tree bark and pieces of old beaver skin to eat.
How the mind is changed by its thorned removes, its hungers,
The way illness, experimenting on the body, forces it into a next it wouldn’t have otherwise
Stumbled toward or known. What is a safe return? What is it to carry an I?
Thoughts break from themselves, odd and brittle.
Thus did we travel for twenty-six days and as of yet no word of ransom.
Our captors are very kind to one another. I remember an elsewhere of not doubting, but it is far away.
Expeditions
November dissolves itself and so haunts the mind,
All the tender peripheries theft-ridden, altering, unsolved.
I feel the slow slave trade of my eyes, their harsh collecting, though every calculation
The shadows in the flesh are very strong.
Tossed-back
But to whom can I say I am thy creature?
The minute bafflements build like a slow fever, the way shock converses with itself
Until it becomes its own rampant landscape, half-tranquilized and burnt
With mourning. And the quietness so brittle, as if starved.
This strange liberty, this thinnest of shelters—I feel it explode itself always. This tossed-back
Into no answer, each hard storm of
Partial and endure—
No clockwork prayer
For I can find no clockwork prayer in me. How the near-enough never resolves itself,
Only carries such clefts of else and never as it goes,
Strict cliffs where the mind breaks itself on itself. Volatile
Thou who is not Thou,
Other I am in the world and far. O broker,
Trust rushes so suddenly away. Each shock ignites
A contradiction. In this wild ungentle a soft pulsing
Quickens oddly. How truthful the ruins which so partially disclose.
This austere and fierce machinery
More distinctive than the smell of walnutleaf or camphor
This severity, this faltering self-hewn and grievous.
Today a shocking thing: a young man put out his eyes.
Being medically trained, he must have known how to proceed, yet it was barbarously
Done with a stick and some wire.
The eyes were found among the nettles in the field.
He won’t say what was the reason.
We live in accumulations of the actual
With so little understanding. Neither am I very strong now.
How alien, how chilling, this austere and fierce machinery of thinking.
The Fourth Remove
The 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 time
I’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 me
Were 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 soon scattering
Waking I saw chains of light on the wall—
Most curious to me the visible world in that it has no motive,
Its structures richly growing or diminishing, regular or irregular, converging or diverging,
Whereas I stumble down steep stairs
Looking for an equal sign a theorem worn keys to a dark that speaks most confused then blue
And soon scattering.
May in bloom. Irises blooming.
This time of year’s a hand opened from the wrist, and reaching.
Genome
This fragility of things
When the sun goes down and the trees are X-rays,
Nerve-patterns stilling in synapses, cold folds. Tenderness stalks these granite
Hills, as if scrutiny could ransom what it covets.
Chaos steps quietly here; no voice-over with it, no scar.
…
No voice-over running, no scar
On these long fields night’s sheared and emptied of their brokenness,
Clefts, small warrings hidden.
If I could see into a human genome I’d see long spaces much like this,
Vast stretches of empty surfaces, then clusters of information teeming,
Then still more empty stretches—
As tonight, reading, I see the spaces between brackets
Where the words of the ancients have been lost—
[ ]
[ ] that labor [ ]