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.

Subscribe to the Poem-a-Day Podcast 

  

“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