Poetry Break: Drawing from Life

The Man in the Crowd (M.A. Reilly, 2014)

Drawing from Life

Reginald Shepherd

Look: I am building absence 
out of this room’s air, I’m reading suppositions into
summer’s script snarled on a varnished floor. 
It looks like a man. That knot’s his hand 
waving good-bye, that stippled stripe of grain’s 
the stacked-up vertebrae of his turned back. 
Small birds (sparrows or finches, or perhaps) 
are cluttering the trees with blackened ornaments (burning
in the remnant light of August eight o’clock), and noises 
I can’t hear. Chirring there, chittering. The window’s closed.

I am assembling a lack of sound 
in this locked box, and dotting all the i’s 
these floating motes present (my composition), I am not lonely
for the palpable world (midges I dap hands for 
and kill), shivering into darkness underwater outside glass:
what’s left of light sinking from zero down to less, 
cobalt down to zaffer, deeper to purple-black 
where divers drown. The swimming landscape’s 
all mistake (one world that shuts air into 
my submerged terrarium), and I am luck.