Scheherazade by Richard Siken

Scheherazade
Richard Siken

Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake
                                                                                          and dress them in warm clothes again.
          How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running
until they forget that they are horses.
               It’s not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,
      it’s more like a song on a policeman’s radio,
                      how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days
were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple
                                                                                                                                      to slice into pieces.
Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it’s noon, that means
        we’re inconsolable.
                                                            Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
                                                                                                      Tell me we’ll never get used to it.

SELECTED BY NICK MARTINO

As a senior in high school with a growing fascination with poetry, I stumbled one day on Richard Siken’s Crush and never left its pages. “Scheherazade” is one of my favorite poems in the collection.

One engine of the poem is the legend of Scheherazade from One Thousand and One Nights: a collection of Middle Eastern folktales. To save herself from execution by a vengeful king who marries and kills a new wife each day, Scheherazade tells him a gripping story each night, always leaving it unfinished.

I love how (as I interpret it) Siken holds this narrative up against the story of the speaker’s relationship, their rapture and revelry disclosed through fragmentary images, as if we’re glimpsing this couple’s love through a keyhole. There is a sense of both the infinite and the finite in this poem that fascinates me: love’s abundance (“and every time we kissed there was another apple / to slice into pieces”) running parallel to the constant threat of its ending, borne out through reminders of both time and death that hover over the narrative (“that means it’s noon”, “we pull the bodies out of the lake”).

I love the dream-logic of this poem (“It’s not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere, / it’s more like a song on a policeman’s radio”) and how it resists easy interpretation. It’s a poem whose emotional valence changes for me depending on what mood I approach it with, as if it were an animal of its own sparkling intelligence.

As if it were its own horse, running and running until it forgets what kind of being it is entirely.

ABOUT NICK MARTINO

Nick Martino is a poet and teacher from Milwaukee. His debut poetry collection “Scrap Book” (Alice James Books) won the 2024 Alice James Editors’ Choice Award and will be published in June of 2026. His poems have been published in Best New Poets, Narrative, Ninth Letter, The Boston Review, and The Southern Review, among others. A finalist for the 2024 Sewanee Review Poetry Prize, he holds an MFA from the University of California, Irvine where he received the 2022 Excellence in Poetry Prize. He lives in LA.