Karen Volkman

What I’ve come to discuss is mostly about shadows and the airs left behind in caring, discarding, the long inhibitions of whereso and when. Alabaster, a dark quire, in its many pages and premises the maze, from which move tendrilled purples and contusions, magnificent fuchsia receivers of false content, the splayed flower, arterial, like the premise of a door is where it leads to or from. Communication of vessel, vial, capsule, hull, a tiniest nil fires the neurons from their swooning stall, is not a healing but adaptation to same a quickening in deleting of sensation a prior sizing. Stacked leaves (green shadows) are givens in the columned garden, what work is needed to determine that shape? Some hysteric trope of repetition, rage for accretion, dazed by its own mute replication, like the minute lines of a hand. They are its cries (writes Ponge, among others), the tongue inseparable from its utterance (langue). We weep to hear it, a language forgot. I was saying I keep speaking from some chamber sound deleted, which is why I never call or write. In that theatre are many eclipses and moons refracted in pinholes and wheels wherein revolve astonished birds, and the Queen of Night sleeps a rest restorative and profitable, and andante allegro, the dead ships never sail.

Sleeping sister of a farther sky, dropped from zenith like a tender tone, the lucid apex of a scale unknown whose whitest whisper is an opaque cry of measureless frequency, the spectral sigh you breath, bright hydrogen and brighter zone of fissured carbon, consummated moan and ceaseless rapture of a brilliant why. Will nothing wake you from your livid rest? Essence of ether and astral stone the stunned polarities your substance weaves in one bright making, like a dream of leaves in the tree’s mind, summered. Or as a brooding bone roots constellations in the body’s nest.

Show me the body that brides its quest, that sleeps its seemings, tremblant inconnue, jeweled Ophelia of diaphanous hue in all her slippings, weed-wedded, water-dressed, the sluice and swooning of her semblant rest— the river ruptures, the weeds branch blue— day’s jaune eyes (wide lucencies) bleed new hollow spaces where the breathings nest, irised mnemosyne, rumored as a rune. Oh roared red pulse, errata, when you die maiden-postured, murmur in the wrist, tendrilled syllables the waters twist, or innered element (it is an I) the dead girl blurring in the blooded noon.

She goes, she is, she wakes the waters primed in their wave-form, a flux of urge struck into oneness, the solid surge seeking completion, and strikes and shatters and is its fragments, distinction’s daughters and now, unholding, the cleave and merge the hew and fusing, plundering the verge and substance is the scheme it scatters and what it numbers in substantial sun. Her hands hold many or her hands hold none. And diving the salt will kiss a convex eye and be salt fact and be the bodied sky and that gray weight is both or beggared one, a dead dimensional, or blue begun.

In May’s gaud gown and ruby reckoning the old saw wind repeats a colder thing. Says, you are the bluest body I ever seen. Says, dance that skeletal startle the way I might. Radius, ulna, a catalogue of flex. What do you think you’re grabbing with those gray hands? What do you think you’re hunting, cat-mouth creeling in the mouseless dawn? Pink as meat in the butcher’s tender grip, white as the opal of a thigh you smut the lie on. In May’s red ruse and smattered ravishings you one, you two, you three your cruder schemes, you blanch black lurk and blood the pallid bone and hum scald need where the body says I am and the rose sighs Touch me, I am dying in the pleatpetal purring of mouthweathered May.

I never wish to sing again as I used to, when two new eyes could always stain the sea, of tangent worlds, indolent as callows, and the clock went backward for a skip, to rise, to set. Some will twine grass to fit in a thimble, some will carve bread to mend a craggy wall, some in the slantest midnight cry for sleep. When the pitch-owl swallows the moon, what welt will show it? Sighing helps nothing, raspberries raw and green, in the form of a heart imperfectly divided. A wave grows sharper close to the shore. Some own words like strips of scape and summon. It is possible to suffer even in the sun. And race the steep noon to its highest, hoary gate. Stares drop under the sky; silence of a windslap; and a scar drifts out of air to stand whistling: She who listens poorly will always be calling. She who sounds silence drowns with the dumb. She who cuts her hands off must drink with her tongue.

I believe there is a song that is stranger than wind, that sips the scald from the telling, toss, toss. In the room I move in, a wrecked boy listened to each sky’s erasing, for it was shrill winter, for it was blast and blur. For it was farther from the native birds and the gray heath heather and the uncaressable thighs of the one who shook in violet. Those who fly farthest must always burn the nest. But the mind in its implacable spec- trum dims to brown. Must you die on your back like a cheap engine, rust and wrack? In the crevicing days, there are no words for prizing, be- tween the lidless moon and the silver hands of the fountain. But if it is space you must fail in, teach it din.

Someone was searching for a Form of Fire. Bird-eyed, the wind watched. Four deer in a blowsy meadow. As though it were simply random, a stately stare. What’s six and six and two and ten? Time that my eye ached, my heart shook, why. Mistaking lime for lemon. Dressed in cobalt, charcoal, thistle—and control. If they had more they would need less. A proposal from the squinting logician. Seems we are legal, seems we are ill. Ponderous purpose, are you weather, are you wheel? Gold with a heart of cinder. Little blue chip dancing in the light of the loom. Mistress, May-girl, whom will you kiss? The death of water is the birth of air.

1. Bridge’s absence gave the creek a new aspect. Uncrossable, irascible. Crosser stems on the bank with her will and form, extension “Phantom of incapacity which is me.” Bright roar of water, x of indomitability. 2. The bridge is not an x. It bridges nothing. The turmoil is only a portion. 3. Bridge on the grass is brideless. Tufts of terra like a bloom in air. Rational slats, a surface’s accretion, slat system. Grass tints it, heliotropic emanation, sharp, up, or complex occupation in shiving rain. 4. Creek’s uncrossability, a new beauty. “It looked like the process of a thinking, deep run.” It became the suffering of form and mute suggestion. The syllables were not perennial. They broke and grew. 5. The blue pants of the crosser were neither sky nor water. They orient to the body as form and boundary. The crosser’s green shirt neither grass nor leaf-thought. Desire to not get wet, another hurt. 6. “Glamour of limit, where the rocks just slant” down the bank, in a wet stratification, and the creek spills blows and goings and is omniform leaving, a prime of seem. 7. High water as a contour of relation swells, hurls. The creek which was other but not antipodal, or refusal. “The wish to touch it with my phenomenal hand” loves it as material. 8. The bridge made the force containable. Bridgeless the crosser sits, and very still. “My phenomenal body crosses and longs.” Ceaseless body of the audible.