POOL 

a journal of poetry

LAURIE SHECK

Poem

I am sorry not to have written you sooner.
     We are peculiar forms, like someone's old papers rifled quickly through 
But not read before the burning.
      How to speak of the icy cave-like place I lately feel, 
Its white reluctance dividing me from all things I desire and see.
      I think it must often be the case
That one holds within oneself a cold guardedness, expectant, deeply quarried,
      The way mistakes grow magnified inside the mind, spiked and strongly
           gleaming.

How skilled, how dominant, this white unswaying place.
      And I wonder how, bred from our churning, it constructs itself so strongly 
Like the crush of light I sometimes at the noonhour hear.