Looking at Rorschachs, Then at Walls

   by Susan Stevens



At night as I languish with Sappho
the white around her words becomes
more prominent than the poems themselves:

It’s the way it is when voices in a room fade
down and out and your own heartbeat grows louder
or when everyone else recedes and the well-lit
room expands in an aura of heat and light,
or in giving birth, when that moment of greatest pressure
outdoes pain that rightly should persist.

Who’s to know at these times what should be far,
and at the foreground?  Late at night as I read,
the sounds of lovers plow through these walls, beating
down a faint erudition; her worsening cough
says he lets her sleep less and less.
The poems I read run to white heat;
looking too long at the page will do that.
I know that the voice of these words, like the boy
poised over his companion next door, is unstoppable.

Once in school when asked to attend to the shapes 
of ink blots for their meaning, we stared at them instead,
closed our eyes for the negative prints, then opened them
to fix the images on walls.  Why we did this, instead,
is unclear; only that focusing on form was less troubling
to fourteen-year-olds than looking for content.

Now as the business of form and content shifts, overturns
Like lovers, gauche in their quick want, so as to make
The two tantamount, words on the page resume
Force, take on their full coloration, augment,
In a flood tide of lettering.