What Is the Difference

1953 –

Stein asked what is the difference. She did not ask what is the sameness. Did not ask what like is. Or proximity. Resemblance. Did not ask what child of what patriarch what height what depth didn’t use a question mark but still wondered at the difference what mutinies it carries over what vast Arctic what far shore.

What is the difference between blind and bond. Between desk and red. Between capsize and sail. Between commodity and question. A lively thing, a fractured thing. To smile at the difference.

(Such gray clouds passing over. Thick, wet sky.)

What is the difference between mutiny and dust. Between noose and edge. Between brittle and obey.

Between shunned and stun. What is the difference.

As now, Mary Shelley’s monster flees to the north, his sack of books his lone companions.

Laurie Sheck is the author of A Monster’s Notes (Knopf, 2009), among other titles.

About Laurie Sheck

Themes

Audio

Loneliness

About this Poem

“This piece came into being during the time I was immersed in the Shelley manuscripts and Frankenstein (a word that I now see contains “stein” herself), and with reimagining Mary Shelley’s “monster” still alive in the 21st century, as I wrote my hybrid work, “A Monster’s Notes.” All writing is hybridity in one form or another—Gertrude Stein, the monster, Mary Shelley, they are all embedded in this piece. As Stein said, “The thing one gradually comes to find out is that one has no identity that is when one is in the act of doing anything…I am I because my little dog knows me but, creatively speaking the little dog knowing that you are you and your recognizing that he knows, that is what destroys creation. That is what makes school.”
—Laurie Sheck

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And water lies plainly

Then I came to an edge of very calm
But couldn’t stay there. It was the washed greenblue mapmakers use to indicate
Inlets and coves, softbroken contours where the land leaves off
And water lies plainly, as if lamped by its own justice. I hardly know how to say how it was
Though it spoke to me most kindly,
Unlike a hard afterwards or the motions of forestalling.

Now in evening light the far-off ridge carries marks of burning.
The hills turn thundercolored, and my thoughts move toward them, rough skins
Without their bodies.

Laurie Sheck

2007

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What Is the Difference

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And water lies plainly

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What Is the Difference

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And water lies plainly

Tender Buttons [A Long Dress]

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