Don't Leave Hungry: Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review

The Shadow

D AV I D R . S L AV I T T The Shadow What boy has never envied Lamont Cranston, invisible, able to fight for truth and justice, defend his country, or slip unseen—and naked, of course—into the girls’ shower at school? It isn’t the trick we imagined but an art, severe in its discipline, arduous (most of them are). The limpid waterdrop, the rarefied upper air, the even more abstract refinements of scienceradar or sonar betray nothing: this is the heart of the matter, that knack of selflessness, the purity of attention that never refracts, never reflects. You see, or don’t, the perfectly clear pane in shop windows. They curve, disappear, tempting the not-so-innocent passerby to suppose he might reach out to scoop up a quick handful of gold and gems. That appetite for riches is what the illusion is likely to kindle. The real abnegation of crystalif only the ball were perfect, we couldn’t see it at all, and the gypsy might yet peer into the future’s maw sets the impossible standard of refinement I know enough now only to dream of: to sneak into that school shower, to see The 1980s ❚ 139 with neither lust’s reflection nor sentiment’s refraction those girls’ young bodies and as clearly their lives and deathsas Dr. Chekhov might, or angels were they to eavesdrop on their giggles. I have held my breath so to listen to a brook’s faint purl I thought I’d imagined but couldn’t imagine where. All of us know what evil lurks in the hearts of men. What’s harder is what is good and unremarkable except to the gazing eye, flawless, selfless as that glass, air, water. Obtuse, opaque, The Shadow got it wrong, knew nothing at all. 140 ❚ The 1980s ...