Andrew Shields: One Poem

Andrew Shields

Andrew Shields was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1964, and raised in Michigan, Ohio, California, and England. His poems have appeared in many journals, as well as in the chapbook Cabinet d’Amateur (Cologne: Darling Publications, 2005). His translations from the German include books by Michael Krueger, Dieter M. Graef, Ilma Rakusa, and Joachim Sartorius, as well as the correspondence of Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt. In addition, he received an NEA grant in 2004 to translate the poetry of Jacques Reda from the French. He lives with his wife and three children in Basel, Switzerland, where he teaches at the University of Basel. He is also a songwriter who plays guitar and mandolin, but lets other people do the singing for him. His blog is at andrewjshields.blogspot.com, and his band Human Shields is at www.myspace.com/humanshieldsband.

Swerve

In what is, what will have been
is tracking words in everything
from twigs to skids. Branches break,
rubber burns – ‘I pushed my way along
the wooded slope of a riverbank
in a German town – the day ever hotter,
the shortcut ever longer.’ The car
brakes in front of where you've stepped
into the street, skidding ever closer.
‘My wipers couldn't fight the storm. The turn
was there before I saw it. I didn't
choose to swerve until I had.’ A red shirt
lying on the grass at dusk. ‘Tell me
what you left behind.’ The water
over the dam; where once a footbridge –
nothing. ‘This was the park, this
the corner.’ He saw the fallen sign –
SPEED LIMIT 55 – leaning against its post
in the desert. He slammed on the brakes,
took it home. ‘When I read the book,
those were its fields, greener than
when I was there.’