Prisms

What is beheld through glass seems glass.

The quality of what I am
Encases what I am not,
Smooths the strange world.
I perceive it slowly
In my time,
In my material,
As my pride,
As my possession:
The vision is love.

When life crashes like a cracked pane,
Still shall I love
Even the slight grass and the patient dust.
Death also sees, though darkly,
And I must trust then as now
Only another kind of prism
Through which I may not put my hands to touch.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on March 18, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“Prisms” first appeared in Laura Riding Jackson’s debut collection, The Close Chaplet (Hogarth Press, 1926). In his introduction to Ugly Duckling Presse’s 2020 reissue of the book, Mark Jacobs, founder of The Laura (Riding) Jackson Archive at Nottingham Trent University, writes that “‘Prisms’—unlike a nature poem, a love poem, a poem of sensory experience, a lyric poem—is not the kind of poem which [sic] describes things. Rather than providing an emotional jolt through such descriptions, it is a poem which [sic] draws the reader into its train of thought. Then, it raises questions seemingly impossible to answer, such as: How does ‘another kind’ of prism, by which she means ‘death,’ differ from the titular? How does love resolve any of the issues raised? And so on. She is affirming that, through her ‘love,’ she claims the universe as hers, just as she is part of the universe. They are united through the mediation of love. However various our backgrounds, educational or otherwise, such a poem does not answer to our contemporary expectations of what a poem might, or should, be. It is not conventionally ‘pretty.’ It is not emotionally satisfying in an immediate way. It does not make us gasp. It leaves us, in fact, floundering: slightly behind, looking for a payoff in the concluding lines. Though we might not grasp what it is, it seems to say something, nevertheless, which looms intelligent.”