Anne Shaw's “Shatter and Thrust as a Series of Silver Gelatin Prints”

If the birches' sticks are edged in black, then silence
means consent. If a skiff slips loose

from its mooring, then nothing can be tied
to a bed or elsewhere, no one can be held

though the white lake in the distance still craves the diver's form
remembering how muscular, how slim,

and how its water, spring-fed, cold, curled
around his body as he dove—

If the mirror in her room could play it back, scene by scene, across its silver skin,
each moment as it was, its arc and gleam,

then the secret language that precedes desire
could be deciphered, spoken in, annulled.

Instead she writes oh fuck oh fuck, the f's
curling back on themselves, the way she's been taught to, scene by scene

as the boy in the memory lights a spliff, hand cupped,
in no distress, not looking up. Then the little bobbin shuttles left

still spooling out its thread, as if to speak, as if to draw him back
though lately she thinks it is more

that a thin communion snaps in two each morning as she wakes (Don't tell
us about the heart you beg Tell us about the flesh Because everyone speaks

in the offing Everyone's broken inside Always already &c.,) But see:
if grass slants dark in the snow-field, if a bird flew

watching for snares, if the bird were a sparrow launched in a reckless wind,
if she felt herself entangled, if she could not close her wing,

then extricated, fitted with a band—
If opening the hand would give release

—a seamless gesture, flight and opening—
then the body might give up its wish, relinquish

what it is: a white field of desire, a field of questions asking
toward their end. If I say make it hurt if I say get the belt

I am thinking of the freeway, its plastic barricades,
and of such little solace as there is. The boy in oval sunglasses

squatting in the dust, his look intent; the boy splayed on the bed
asleep or half asleep, her coming in—

The photographs she's taken in her mind
because the body can't be trusted, because the body

soon forgets, though absence enters, claims her
as its own. If a stop sign slants through the morning facing the other way,

if the post is splintered, the grain of it rough in the print
on this road I walk down toward my end

the white erasure hovering, its dream of being found
and mine, of brokenness beyond repair—

beyond want of repair—then the rowboats, too,
are errant, slipping past the buoys. How well I loved you in that other place

I once called home, I once called manifest.
As if all that burned were burning. In that room where the light cried out.

How small the body seems now. How tough, how absolute.
When I say hurt me, this is what I mean.