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With Shut Eyes What My Mind Sees Does Not Belong To Me


In the city whose streets I knew
by the size of candles kept lit
for the neighbor’s missing children


I ate melons in a dusty kitchen
and pierced lures into the lips of fish in my aquarium


until each hook became a leaf
that floated out from the fishes’ mouths
and up to the water’s surface.


When birds lit on the front lawn
I scared them off with erratic movements.


The voices of my depressed and handsome neighbors
were roughly the same as mine.


Me and not me and the two halves
by the same name.


I lost some people and made a few mistakes.


Each day, I tried to give myself
a different name. Today, you are Jim
I would say, and vertigo might fill your veins


and you will surely lack direction.


Near the freeway entrance
I tried to keep certain thoughts at arm’s distance.
I watched a runaway kill snow with urine.


Above him, tiny birds
called out from their common nest.

In the city whose streets I knew
by the size of candles kept lit
for the neighbor’s missing children





I ate melons in a dusty kitchen
and pierced lures into the lips of fish in my aquarium

until each hook became a leaf
that floated out from the fishes’ mouth
and up to the water’s surface.

When birds lit on the front lawn
I scared them off with erratic movements.

The voices of my depressed and handsome neighbors
were roughly the same as mine.

Me and not me and the two halves
by the same name.

I lost some people and made a few mistakes.

Each day, I tried to give myself
a different name. Today, you are Jim
I would say, and vertigo might fill your veins

and you will surely lack direction.

Near the freeway entrance
I tried to keep certain thoughts at arm’s distance.
I watched a runaway kill snow with urine.

Above him, tiny birds
called out from their common nest.




Rob Schlegel

levelheaded: With Shut Eyes What My Mind Sees Does Not Belong to Me


Rob Schlegel’s “With Shut Eyes What My Mind Sees Does Not Belong to Me” is like a self-conscious, well-ventilated Robert Frost poem. Like spectators at the end of Frost’s “Out, Out—” Schlegel’s speaker turns to his own affairs. Like the grieving father in “Home Burial,” his speaker conceals his feelings behind a banal set of actions. Schlegel’s poem is instructed by Frost’s emotional messiness. Loss is an amorphous and unpredictable thing, and in “With Shut Eyes What My Mind Sees Does Not Belong to Me,” Schlegel shows us that the self is loss’s only real barometer.


The poem’s lengthy, convoluted title and fold-out lines like “Me and not me and the two halves / by the same name” alert us to the speaker’s mental meandering. Simultaneously, the lines’ syntactical strangeness points toward the inability of language to fully express the speaker’s self-reflection. When paired with a recurring and potentially sinister detail about missing children, the speaker’s self-reflection is disquieting and seemingly inappropriate.


Words like “lost” and “lure” that have a sense of innocence in other situations, retain a subtle terror when applied to missing children. This and other uses of double entendre highlight the emotional crapshoot that loss can become. In the poem’s heaviest image, Schlegel writes “Above him, tiny birds / called out from their common nest.” Here, “common” means both ordinary and communal, awarding a larger social implication to an unexceptional course of thought.


If “With Shut Eyes What My Mind Sees Does Not Belong to Me” is a discourse on loss and self, its philosophy relies on hints. The poem hints at a connection between citizen and society. It hints at the unnatural terror of a lost child. It hints at blame and fault and guilt. For all its suggestion though, lines like “I ate melons in a dusty kitchen” root the poem in specific and sometimes spectacular images.



– The Editors