Captivity

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Captivity Page 1

by Laurie Sheck




  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

     Ends in broken. Expeditions. Savageries.

  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 [ ]

 

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