Life, this charade of not-death.
Amnesiac of our nights together,
overheard talking in some other voice.
The great fruits of my failure:

silk milk pills with little bitter pits.
Who talks like that? Says we are

ever-locked, leaving everything
petalled and veined the way nature

pretended. Synthesized within
an inch of its life. O the many faces

of facelessness, breathing in the dark-
as if we could shape softness itself,

mold it around us like yams mashed
against a trough by a snuffling snout.

Our own. There's no way out. Born
to such extra, we are born to lose.

No hairy fingers tapering to threads,
grasping for some lost last use.

Once we were hungry on earth,
soon buried like root vegetables-

to starve the soil as beets do,
growing in our graves.

But now we must remember
our way back to face-to-face,

to eye to eye and hand in hand,
and lock and step and key in hole.

Remembering how not to fall asleep,
we become so desperately drowsy,

and all cells strain to slow to a stop.
All desire to choose otherwise quiets.

No, no one can say we didn't suffer,
that we weren't swallowed whole.


About this poem
"About this poem, I can say it's about failure. How we fail to live (if to live means to live fully, with awareness, in connection with all things, in moments not striving to capture them or to make them add up to something) and how we fail to die (what is buried nourishes root vegetables, trees, air; our words spark in others, or they could, if we could only do it right) lets desire triumph. We want and we wish for-we suffer that; it's a failure I can live with, and hope never to lose."
-Brenda Shaughnessy

About Brenda Shaughnessy
Brenda Shaughnessy is the author of "So Much Synth" (Copper Canyon Press, 2016). She teaches at Rutgers University-Newark and lives in Verona, N.J.

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The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day[at]poets.org.


(c) 2016 Brenda Shaughnessy. Originally published in Poem-a-Day, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate