Poem-A-Day: Roar Shack by Alice Fulton

Roar Shack by Alice Fulton     Many see a flutterby when they look into this    omniscience I see as a skinniness too densely drawn  or a mystery unhinged by its own symmetry, a twinning  I think of as a listener that thinks along  with me, fused in a tweed, a red herringbone  weave in the dazzling darkness  and bleached afterness some see    as a necklace of brilliants curved in gift. As if!    A color visible only in ultraviolet  light or a source beyond mathematics I think  of as a second self, an underhum. Or thought. Till I saw  innocence tortured by a force  beyond kindness, an unconditional indifference    or wick for wickedness that wanted trauma dolls.    I tell this as a clock tells time but telling can't diminish it    as clocks can't dwindle time. Am I still alive?  Birds that sing behind a waterfall, horses kneeling  Christmas Eve are what others see in what I see  as us delivered up to this chill that searches me.       Copyright © 2013 by Alice Fulton. Used with permission of the author.   About This Poem "'Roar Shack' begins with a depiction of God or omniscience as an ink blot, a Rorschach that's configured in various ways, depending on who's looking into it. I used to feel that some entity was witnessing everything that happened, and this assumption of accompaniment ran so deep I didn't realize it existed until it was destroyed. The poem moves from a sense of hope to a hollowness created by trauma and witness: the numbness that follows an encounter with brutality--a  brutality that suggests the absence of God."   --Alice Fulton Most Recent Book by Fulton Cascade Experiment (W. W. Norton & Company, 2005)   September 6, 2013 Alice Fulton's most recent book is Cascade Experiment (W. W. Norton & Company, 2005). She teaches at Cornell University.  Related Poems Daily Life by Susan Wood The Secret by Denise Levertov The Layers by Stanley Kunitz Poem-A-Day Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-A-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Browse the  Poem-A-Day Archive.         Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.

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