POEM
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.
Laurie Sheck, "A quiet skin" from Captivity. Copyright © 2007 by Laurie Sheck. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Born and raised in the Bronx, poet Laurie Sheck was educated at the University of Iowa. She has . . . MORE »
