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| Searching... Author: SHECK, LAURIE Matches Found: 133 Sheck, Laurie Poet's Biography 133 poems available by this author A QUIET SKIN Poem Text First Line: Thinking has a quiet skin. But I feel the break and fled of things inside it. Subject(s): Thought; Thinking AIRWAVES First Line: These voices cut off from flesh, from eyes Last Line: Stiffens and shudders through the hours. Fear has no voice ALMOND FLOWERS First Line: How beautiful, what is not made by fear Last Line: Do you remember how we buried our toys %in the snow? When I touch the almond flowers %they are cold ALTHOUGH IT IS DAYLIGHT First Line: Although it is daytime inside the parking garage it is dark Last Line: Before it fled away AMD WATER LIES PLAINLY Poem Text First Line: Then I came to an edge of very calm ANNUNCIATION First Line: This is the honest grace of her body Last Line: To bend before the given, its arms that open %unexplained, and take us in AT NIAUX First Line: Fists and wounds of light, battlements and ranks of light: we Last Line: Our faces, anything, %the blackout singing, taking it all in BLACK FIGURES First Line: In paiore's drawing of the creation Last Line: And must rise slowly again and falter again %until it wavers on unsteady legs %there at the quiet ed BLACK NIGHT First Line: Black night severe as a frock-coat or doctrine Last Line: Look, they have escaped. Their mutinous wreathes are teeming in the sun BLACK SERIES, SELS First Line: I didn't want to only dream in black and white Last Line: Yellow loosestrife bright outside the window, then the stars BLACK SERIES, SELS. First Line: On the crest of the far hill, the lone tree Last Line: It is this my eyes will close on BLACK SERIES, SELS. First Line: Night ministers to the trees - no, it just comes on Last Line: And then a steepness breeding lilies, milkweed, thorns BLACK SERIES, SELS. First Line: Think hands, think mouth, think eyes. Those pieces floating Last Line: When no one can hear. When touched. When scattered. When hidden. %when watched Subject(s): Bodies BOND First Line: With his large gnarled hand Last Line: His father's hand a lightness on his shoulder %as they slip back into the human world? BOOK OF PERSEPHONE: 1 First Line: This darkness. And what rises up out of this darkness Last Line: Like the pressure of a hand BOOK OF PERSEPHONE: 10 First Line: Light like nervous laughter: I remember that quickness Last Line: Before the serious, far stars BOOK OF PERSEPHONE: 11 First Line: The furious blackout lifts and splinters Last Line: Because they cannot transgress what they are BOOK OF PERSEPHONE: 12 First Line: Strange light. Its fluency drifting and glittering as fields and hillsides Last Line: And this geography of voices, burnings, change BOOK OF PERSEPHONE: 2 First Line: What song do the hills sing as they whiten? Last Line: Of the hills. I listen to the way they have grown cold %and cannot wander BOOK OF PERSEPHONE: 3 First Line: White grove, white traces of dawn Last Line: The frost gives up its wayward steps inside you BOOK OF PERSEPHONE: 4 First Line: The river is quiet now, and dark, as if inside it Last Line: An eye that couldn't close, and couldn't ever be removed BOOK OF PERSEPHONE: 5 First Line: There is no wind in these trees at all Last Line: As if to find some world to cling to BOOK OF PERSEPHONE: 6 First Line: Grass fronds, leaves in wind. The light smooth Last Line: Where is its hiding place? Where is the ghost of its waking on my skin? BOOK OF PERSEPHONE: 7 First Line: As if the binding had broken, the binding of the beautiful book Last Line: Like a lost language that has no word for harm BOOK OF PERSEPHONE: 8 First Line: The willows shed their brittle seeds Last Line: And then the long withdrawal, the retreat into the waiting hive BOOK OF PERSEPHONE: 9 First Line: I walk out into the buzzing field whose sky is like a book Last Line: Of that burning, there is the rapture of its watching eyes BRIDAL VEIL Poem Text First Line: On the crest of the far hill, the one tree BROKEN STATUE First Line: The broken face of the kore Last Line: How beautiful she is, incapable of shame, %incapable of lying CAVE First Line: There is a hollowness in remembrance Last Line: When the soul was not divided, %when it did not punish itself, %not yet, for what it felt %and what CELL, SAN MARCO First Line: She must not touch him Last Line: And the clear unperjured space between their bodies %like something breathing, being born CHILDHOOD First Line: The diamond-patterned store gates screech open as my father unlocks them Last Line: Could listen and protect them, encircling them with kindness as they sleep CHILDHOOD POND First Line: You lay among the cold stone statues Last Line: What she must live with from now on is the long echo %of that silence, %that echo is her house, her CURRICULUM VITAE First Line: It is 1973, in rome, late summer Last Line: The bird's feathers are quite lovely %in the moonlight, whatever comes to pass CYPRESSES First Line: So much is hidden by lies. Is that why the cypresses are beautiful Last Line: As they shine green-black and pure where she can't touch them DEER First Line: The deer is patience Last Line: To not belong in the world, %as if it were this easy DISTANCE First Line: It is the body's loneliness which is its ardor Last Line: Because she did not touch them %all night she dreams of deer DRIVING HOME Poem Text First Line: Here in this decentered light, this sizzling, reeling hum Last Line: Their blameless light so far from here, so wordless, unconstrained Subject(s): Automobile Drivers EURYDICE First Line: It was the journey back toward memory that hurt her Last Line: Into the blackness, the slow freezing of her legs and arms) %she still felt the world waiting. She o EURYDICE IN THE UNDERWORLD First Line: What's that sound now growing louder? What swiftness Last Line: Into the river, letting go of the rootstalks, %letting go of the rock EVENING WALK First Line: The sky's the color of an x-ray pinned to the viewing light Last Line: Not having sensed it yet-the broken world FEBRUARY MORNING First Line: Low fog. Snow-melt. Pines. Then the things of this world brightening Last Line: To make a path where earthly love might enter FILMING JOCASTAA First Line: You must not show her face. Only the hands Last Line: And the hands cannot cover them FRIEZE OF LITTLE HORSES, LASCAUX First Line: How calm they are Last Line: But nothing has harmed them. %nothing has changed %their watchfulness to dread FROM BLACK SERIES First Line: Even the mannequins change %as the headlights pass over them, swathing them in Last Line: Over the envious %silver, prisoned glass HAPPINESS First Line: On liu li chang street, in beijing Last Line: He has his patience and his gifts. The mild sun shines. %he watches the doorway. He waits HARBOUR BOATS First Line: The harbour boats are taciturn. The bells echo down from the hills Last Line: Like secrets released, bit by bit, into a waiting ear HEADLIGHTS First Line: Night, and I watched from the side Last Line: Over the riven vanished earth IN SPRING First Line: I carried the baby on my back over the steep flagstone streets Last Line: But a part like the ripped corner of one beautiful illuminated page IN THE BASILICA OF SAN FRANCESCO First Line: In the quiet chamber that holds us Last Line: And thorny vines, pressing hard into the forest's %haunted promise, deep into the mangled beauty of IN THE CITY OF GOLD DOMES First Line: Once the dream might have spoken Last Line: And the streets where miners tread slowly in their heavy chains INCIPIENCE First Line: Before I missed the banished verbs Last Line: Within the room's hushed dimness %as if it had sought long to find us %and stroked our icy hair INN First Line: The air darkens in gradations like a xeroxed page Last Line: Floats in a small stillness. There will be no photos to take back IO First Line: I am watched by the eyes in a peacock's tail IO AT NIGHT First Line: How gray the earth is now, how still Last Line: That dream whose body was much purer than my own, %like the cold cliffs %at the farthest reaches of IO IN THE WIND ONGOING First Line: This texture of unknowing, texture of undulence, of fear Last Line: Like the soul that knows it can do nothing %but set out like a child's dream into the dark IO SEES TOWERS IN THE DISTANCE First Line: In the distance -- is it a city? How the manifest Last Line: In the wind. Fear moves through the human body %teaching it the world LEARNING TO READ First Line: I know there is something that mocks us, and it is cold and distant and Last Line: Gravestones in snow. A mouth obsessively unnaming what is known LEPER COLONY First Line: Dearest sisters, today a man in a brown suit arrived to visit us Last Line: Safe and cool in the deceiving air LIVING COLOR First Line: At first there's greenish flesh until the knob's Last Line: There is no way to shut them off LOVE POEM Poem Text First Line: After the flesh is stripped and cut for meat Subject(s): Whales LOVERS First Line: He looked out his window, while beside him the woman slept Last Line: How small they looked in their flayed nocturnal boat. %how far from the green beginnings of the eart MADWOMAN IN THE ATTIC First Line: All things journey back into absence. Your hands, this night Last Line: And my white dress is the night sky, its sleeves are blown %to nothing by the wind MAETERLINCK'S BEES First Line: Coming and going from the hive, they are black lines of a lie detector Last Line: They have nothing to hide MAIN STREET First Line: Night-hushed, the rows of brittle windows Last Line: And a tomcat's cry %cuts like a baby's scream through the alley. %their shadows never change MANNEQUINS First Line: Rifle-thin, they stand in their angelic armor Last Line: Tomb and the eyes it left there, open, as they froze MARIONETTES First Line: From behind the painted cardboard village Last Line: But can speak it only to themselves MEDUSA Poem Text First Line: I can almost taste the glassy air. Where are the birds in it, Subject(s): Medusa MORNING WALK First Line: The clouds thin, dismantling their muffled kingdom Last Line: Wormy and moist and sworming with torn roots MUMMY First Line: Mummy girl, unearthed now, your wrappings fraying, gray Last Line: That is saying: here I am torn, here I am broken off in mid-sentence NEW ENGLAND GRAVEYARD First Line: This is the city of staring, tireless eyes Last Line: Have hunger for, why the earth %grows more beautiful %the more she cannot touch it NIOBE, ALSO, OF THE BEAUTIFUL HAIR, THOUGHT OF EATING First Line: And for one moment Last Line: Her grief-palled body hardened also %beyond longing or remembrance, %a white and rain-struck stone NO SUMMER AS YET Poem Text First Line: And no summer as yet, but it will come with its bright pieces of whatever Subject(s): Disability; Speech; Body, Human; Oratory; Orators NOCTURNE: BLUE WAVES First Line: There are times when the mind Last Line: How beautiful the earth %might seem again from that distance. %how possible love NOCTURNE: FLOATING WINDOWS First Line: Shunless black air and gray where the windows float Last Line: And that, as if in time they could cohere into a wholeness %and beckon and follow and be seen NOCTURNE: MANNEQUINS, FULL MOON First Line: Tonight the moon hangs pocked Last Line: She will never be changeless; %with her skull-face of longing, %with her mouth that is open and brui ONE DAY First Line: One day long after we are dead Last Line: To hold it as we'd hold a frightened child %who had woken, without language, in the dark PARKING LOT AT NIGHT First Line: Bluish light of the deserted parking lot at night Last Line: From their living room, in winter, %the snow softly falling,as if he had never spoken, never lived PERSEPHONE First Line: She sits in the underworld among ghosts with outstretched arms Last Line: Who knelt on the muddy ground in the moonlight %smearing dirt on her naked face %and singing to the PERSEPHONE TO DEMETER First Line: My pillow is cold, mother, and my little bed so neat Last Line: As it glides between the earth above my cave %and the silent, cloud-masked sky Subject(s): Demeter; Persephone PICTURE FOR SALE ABOVE A CASH REGISTER First Line: Inside the fake gold frame Last Line: Remembering when they were children, %when even the countertops floated %above them, mysterious and POEM Poem Text First Line: I am sorry not to have written you sooner. Subject(s): Writing & Writers POEM First Line: The mind is a thing deeply marked. I have bound myself to this damage Last Line: Grows intricate where the stresses fall POEM First Line: Such hidden mutinies inside the mind Last Line: On my face a most splintery destroy POEM First Line: And no summer as yet, but it will come with its bright pieces of whatever Last Line: Sharply upon the air and always POEM First Line: All the more rare and wilder Last Line: It is hard to seize what is POEM BEGINNING WITH A LINE FROM SAPPHO First Line: O aphrodite, despise not my doll's little purple neckerchief Last Line: Helplessly enslaved as your own shadow %despise not the empty basket in her hands POPPIES First Line: Red poppies, you do not open onto treachery or possession Last Line: Before sleep, before the windows fully blacken PROMETHEUS'S WRIST First Line: More and more she thought of it Last Line: Against which he must mold himself, %lifting his eyes into the distances RAIN First Line: I can hear the rain now, its vanishing Last Line: Where over and over it shatters itself to be made whole RED COW AT LASCAUX First Line: This is the claustral beauty of the body Last Line: Curled at its side. But like an unhealed %wound, its red flesh goes on %burning, its red flesh %cann RED DEER AT LASCAUX First Line: And then the guide's narrow light Last Line: And the sinews and the flesh came upon them %and the skin covered them %and breath came into them an RESURRECTION OF THE BODY First Line: How they want to be whole again. They believe in wholeness Last Line: This flawed world is more beautiful than anything %and we have it for so brief a time RETURN First Line: And then he entered the city: in the old stories Last Line: I touch each faceless face, like frost Subject(s): Cities RIVER, CLIFF-FACE, STONE First Line: Their softness frightened them Last Line: Its eyes gazing deep into their faces, %this child that could not heal them RUSH HOUR First Line: These are the objects, the touchable -- table, regrigerator, chair Last Line: Claimed her, %and one day she will name it, calling it her body and her soul SEA First Line: I watched the water-the stilled bay. I thought I heard it speaking Last Line: Can eradicate or alter, nor naming nor misnaming harm SEAWEEDS First Line: Before we touched medusa's head we felt the soft wreckage Last Line: We think: cloisters of envy threshold shooting star SHE SEES THE DARK BIRDS First Line: Here in the darkened room is her face on the pillow Last Line: She sees the dark-winged birds %rising without sound off the water %as if no human voice could touch SLEEPING BEAUTY First Line: A dark narrow stairway Subject(s): Fairy Tales SO FAR AWAY Poem Text First Line: Think hands, think mouth, think eyes. Those pieces floating Last Line: When / watched Subject(s): Body, Human SO FAST AWAY Poem Text First Line: Think hands, think mouth, think eyes. Those pieces floating SOUL REVISITING THE BODY First Line: Why do you return? Last Line: Now I am inanimate. %your longing a flame %that cannot woundme. %your wings embrace %an emptiness li STAIRWAYS First Line: To say 'once' is to begin Last Line: Not finite and not destroyed STOCKROOM First Line: I watch the boy shoot up Last Line: Of earthly terror, earthly place? STONE COUNTENANCE First Line: Carved into the chapel's cold stone pavement Last Line: Cutting it and cutting it, and then the small %hushed act ofhealing, and then the cutting, %the betr STREETS First Line: The child sleeps in her crib Last Line: Where it will float as if lifted away from her forever %and divided over and over SURFACE OF EARTH First Line: She thought of them Last Line: While the earth continued in its strangeness %like a promise entering their bodies as they slept SYCAMORE First Line: Each day on my morning walk I see you Last Line: In my sleep I see you burning THE DEER Poem Text First Line: The deer is patience Subject(s): Deer THE MANNEQUINS Poem Text First Line: How can they know uncertainty, the mannequins Last Line: That shijne like computer screens, incarnate and withheld Subject(s): Mannequins THE RETURN Poem Text First Line: And then he entered the city: in the old stories Subject(s): Cities; Urban Life THE SOUL REVISITING THE BODY Poem Text First Line: Why do youj return? Subject(s): Soul; Body, Human; Future Life; Retribution; Eternity; After Life THINKING OF THE WHITE LAMB AT SAN APOLLINARE EN CLASSE First Line: She stands where danger cannot find her, where danger doesn't have a face Last Line: For a moment cannot find %the sleeping child TO IO, AFTERWARDS First Line: I suppose you are weary now of remembering Last Line: And for the first time you saw it. You who watched it %with longing from a distance unbridgeable as TO SOFTNESS First Line: Under junk heaps and stripped and burning cars Last Line: Breath at the door, something in need of protection, %something capable of feeling harm TRACKS Poem Text First Line: Someone's been getting at these subway cars at night Subject(s): Night; Paintings And Painters; Subways; Bedtime TRACKS First Line: Someone's been painting these subway cars at night Last Line: They catch and glitter in her tangled hair Subject(s): Night; Paintings And Painters; Subways UNDRESSING Poem Text First Line: He dreams she is a room Subject(s): Transience; Clothing & Dress; Impermanence UNFINISHED First Line: We were characters in a story Last Line: As we held to the earth and didn't understand the earth UNTITLED Poem Text First Line: There are times when the mind Subject(s): Mind, The VIEW OF THE ASYLUM GARDEN First Line: These trees feed on the stars. There is such a strong willingness in their bodi Last Line: Like sentences whispering, wandering, threading themseleves into the dark VISIT First Line: From its bed of hay Last Line: Imprisonment that claims us VOLTAGE First Line: So it goes on, this waking to static Last Line: As they channel their invisible voltage through the air WALKING First Line: And now, inside the walkman, the tape turns Last Line: How it wants to be not still-anything but that-not still WATCHING TELEVISION First Line: All night the small gray figures walk and walk. Their bodies Last Line: The red pulse of the columbine does not touch them. %nor the ticking of the clock. Nor the cry of a WATER First Line: What was it that troubled Last Line: Even as I fell asleep %I knew my other face still drifted there, %my other hands WHITE LIGHT First Line: Seizure of light, white noise Last Line: As you close austerely over us WHITE NOISE Poem Text First Line: The faces are lifted up into the jumpy light Subject(s): Cities; Urban Life WHITE NOISE First Line: The faces are lifted up into the jumpy light Last Line: When I suffer, I cannot forget that I am, nor fail to know that I am nothing Subject(s): Cities WINTER 1881 First Line: Mary, in her blindness, waits for me Last Line: And I will lie and tell her mary, yes, %of course I'll be your eyes WINTER TREES First Line: The plenty is a lie, isn't it Last Line: They clung to such wavery skeletons, %looking in, looking in. %black paths, my sisters, %rivers of I WOOD LILY, ETC. First Line: A hiddenness sang to me, lured me in. I heard it even in daylight Last Line: From his sickbead to touch the curious redeeming braille WOUNDED WHALE First Line: What has not been touched is the deep black Last Line: This brutal, slow acceptance %by one more living creature %that only it %is permanent |
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