Blues for Bill: A Tribute to William Matthews Book

1. Frost, then ridged snow.
     The body can't rest when it's in pain. Outside: hills closed as the cells' glass secrecies, 
Waste spaces etched and fissured with genetic script. (The mind would pierce them)
2.  Extremity/Planting itself in me until I am most Northerly and lost--all tundra-cold whiteness and mistrust.
Winter-taught, ignorant, unsolved. (The Second Remove)
3. December night. The north winds shift above the icy hill; (Hidden liberty)
4. How alien, how chilling, this austere and fierce machinery of thinking. (This austere and fierce machinery)
5. In the poem Genome, Sheck uses brackets in partial lines to suggest the effect of poetry translated from ancient mss. that are missing words, lines, or phrases do to damage. Sheck credits Guy Davenport's translation of Sappho fragment 24.

[            ]
[   ] that labor [     ]
[   ] to sing [        ]
[       ] a storm wind [       ] 
[     ] and no pain [      ]
 What survives is mutilated, torn--on scraps of papyrus/
     Used to mummify crocodiles, on pottery shards...

6.  Thinking is a truceless act. (Comfort binds itself)
7. There are so many thresholds in the body.
     The cells in their distant otherness inside me.( The cells in their distant otherness)
8.      How to speak of the icy cave-like place I lately feel,
Its white reluctance dividing me from all things I desire and see.
9. And now this January whiteness destroys the covered-over of itself. (So many bending threads)
10. In so biting a cold, the Norths in me hardening, sun stripped of crown. (The Thirteenth Remove)


The purpose in collecting these notes was to try and get a grasp of some imagery that seems to be common between these poems and Sheck's novel "A Monster's Notes". Specifically, she uses a lot of images of cold, piercing cold, the North, frozen wastes, etc.