Reginald Shepherd’s poetry is both passionate and intelligent, deftly mixing the poet’s interest in myth with a respect for history and a wistful awe of love. Many strands of thought and allusion can occur simultaneously in a Shepherd poem, a careful layering that rewards repeated reading.
Born in New York City in 1963, Shepherd was raised in the Bronx and attended Bennington College. He received two M.F.A.’s—one from Brown University in 1991, another from the University of Iowa in 1993. A recipient of a “Discovery”/The Nation award and a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship, Shepherd is the author of Some Are Drowning (1994) and Angel, Interrupted (1996). His poetry has been published widely in literary journals, including Poetry, Tri-Quarterly, and The Iowa Review, as well as the 1995 and 1996 volumes of The Best American Poetry. Shepherd currently lives in Chicago and teaches at Northern Illinois University.
The eye of the lake is on fire. Pluck it out:
a bloom of clotted blood that stains the palm
with wounded light. Sunset inflects surface tensions
with its bluster, then recedes
into the I-am-not-a-little-boy, rumors the skin becomes
of glass. This is my heart of running water
stilled, pooled sap from snapped stems and reeds
broken by a touch, now irretrievable. (Someone
who sank centuries ago is asking me to stir
a current, someone’s asking for the underside
of my blurred face. This clearing in the myth of woods
was never mine.) My fascination multiplies
these flowers out of frost and cobwebs, filaments of morning
ice breath violates: their fragments
sink in concentric ripples. A skipped stone
bears no loss: drowned as I am
among the surfaces of things, my features
will never heal. These brackish waters
close over every sacrifice. Socrates once
told me, Know thyself. (Or twice, I can’t recall.) I wanted that
myself, but here I am with dew
and drenched red petals, a cloud in bloom.
When I look down, I see the season’s blinding flowers,
the usual mesmerizing and repellent artifacts:
a frat boy who turns too sharply from my stare,
a cardinal capturing vision in a lilac bush
on my walk home. I’m left to long
even for simple dangers. From the waist up
it’s still winter, I left world behind
a long time ago; waist down it’s catching
up, a woodpecker out my window is mining grubs
from some nameless tree squirrels scramble over.
When I turn back it’s gone, I hadn’t realized
this had gone so far. (Everywhere I look
it’s suddenly spring. No one asked
if I would like to open drastically. Look up.
It’s gone.) Everywhere fruits dangle
I can’t taste, their branches insurmountable,
my tongue burnt by frost. White boys, white flowers,
and foul-mouthed jays, days made of sky-blue boredoms
and everything seen much too clearly:
the utterance itself is adoration, kissing
stolid air. I hate every lovely thing about them.
These are the years of the empty hands. And what
were those just past, swift with the flash of alloyed hulls
but carrying no cargo? Outside our lives, my mythical
America, dingy rollers fringed with soot deposit
cracked syringes and used condoms on beaches tinted gray
by previous waves, but when an hour waits just for a moment,
everything begins again. All of it is yours, the longed-for
mundane: men falling from a cloud-filled sky like flakes of snow
onto the ocean, your mother immersed in ordinary misery
and burning breakfast, still alive in the small tenement
kitchen. You understand I use the second person
only as a marker: beyond these sheltered bays are monsters,
and tarnished treasures of lost galleons
it’s death to bring to light. The ships put out
and they sink; before the final mast descends, the shadow
of a single sailor is burned across the sun, then wrapped
in strands of cirrus, his European skin a gift
to the black and unknown ocean floor. Of the slaves
thrown overboard to save the ship, no words
remain. What memorials the public beach becomes
in late October, scattered with Puerto Rican families
on muddied sand still lighter than a black man’s
pound of flesh: it abrades my skin. I can’t touch
that perfected picture of myself, no white wave
will wash either hand clean. There is a wind
riding in on the tainted waves, and what it cannot
make whole it destroys. You would say that all along
I chose wrong, antonyms of my own face
lined up like buoys, but there is another shore
on the far side of that wind. Everything is there,
outside my unhealed history, outside my fears. I
can see it now, and every third or fourth wave is clear.