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The girl on the screen
is telling
.........something,
eyes
.........not looking
at the camera,
................voice a babbled
drone, ghost town
of un-
.........inhabitable
affect--
.........difficult
to hear
.........till it falls
faint behind the voice
of the interpreter
whose words obedient
and diligent build up
a tower around her
brick by articulate
brick
.........till there is
nothing left
................to notice
as the lens widens
but the charred sandal
in the foreground,
.......................how the breeze
blows back the smoke
still rising from it
so that it’s running
.......................toward me
as it runs in place.

*Alan Shapiro, fellow to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has published eight books of poetry: Tantalus in Love (2005), Song and Dance (2002), The Dead Alive and Busy (2000), Selected Poems (2000), Mixed Company (1996), Covenant (1991), Happy Hour (1987), The Courtesy (1983), and After the Digging (1981). Shapiro is also the author of three books of prose: Vigil (1997), The Last Happy Occasion (1996), In Praise of the Impure: Poetry and the Ethical Imagination (1993). Poetry editor of the Phoenix Poets Series at the University of Chicago Press from 1994 to 2000, and co-editor of Greek Tragedy in New Translation at Oxford University Press, Shapiro published a translation of The Oresteia by Aeschylus, and is currently at work on a verse translation of The Trojan Women by Euripides. Shapiro has received numerous awards and honors, including two awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, the O.B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C., the Sarah Teasdale Award from Wellesley College, and an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was also a 1991 recipient of a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award. The William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina, Shapiro has also taught in the MFA Creative Writing program at UNC, Greensboro, and at Northwestern University.