Indeterminacy
The cog in the eye turns
Until there is nothing left
To discern. I sip tea
Steeped in a kind of lust—
If I say I am, you are, he/she/it is . . .
We don’t have to agree
But it requires, to mean,
A common rubric.
The clock reads the time
Because we set it. I mean,
How else? Who is anyone
Who is anyone?
The grass edges outline the grave:
Get to living!
Copyright © 2023 by Charif Shanahan. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 27, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.
“This sonnet questions the integrity of the ‘categories’ of identity in which we live and which render some of us illegible to others, sometimes even to ourselves. By meditating on the constructedness of these categories, the speaker arrives at a new understanding of the desire for legibility: even when the circumstances are such that that desire cannot consistently be met, one possesses the agency to choose; to live, without reaching for a determinacy that their being resists, and to do so now, where life happens.”
—Charif Shanahan
Charif Shanahan
Charif Shanahan is the author of Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (Southern Illinois University Press, 2017), winner of the 2015 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award.