I was watching for it, everytime watching, for the neck that was bent,
for the nape that was bare. The hand holding a cup was holding a thin
cup, then the cup was broken, and the fluid gone. So things were the
same–eyes stayed blue, limbs retained their curves, slacks and sleeves.
Someplace more thoughtless something would happen, less full of
couches and women and legs. The windows were waiting, and the lamps,
and the hat donned once, discarded, and the hesitant hips, and the whis-
per which forebore. For all was intent, potential, not fulfill.
I go out sometimes, like a shadowless ghost, less remnant than lip, in
the incomparable midnight of intransigent mist, and the doomsayers and
lockpickers, cloudlike in clairvoyance. Lad, you keep the latch hanging,
keep the curtain drawn. Beyond blue night, when the puppets are sleep-
ing, the stars all coiled in their tremulous wheel, the thin moon summers
in my goldenest gaze, awakening dreaming oceans, to drown, to roam.
Sky-eyed scholar, pale Confucius: Put down your book.
Karen Volkman
The first greeting on a bright sift, yes. And the less falls, a loss does.
You will not be absent in the day’s convocation, as a trickle wakes to
find itself in the rift’s mind. It drifts from the demurral in the clouds,
case off, to the uniform sameness of soil, a stream patiently distilling
itself from stone. A blind culmination, at that trace where nothing stops
being, no sweet surfeit–one could reject it, not from conviction, a less
rational sorrowing strip from the sky, escaping when the stone falls.
It goes, straying from some refined mass of resistance. Something
harder, one height against another, as the gradual, slow nourishment of
artifice prevents you, unravelling, destroying no molecule in progress.
Somewhere here on the firm ground you have pressed farther apart
those ten tricks from the chaos which you rejected one by one–noth-
ing to leave, worth stealing. It never meant to be casually accruing. Un-
der the nothing of what decayed, or some scarcity, staying. Loss implies
such rigid divisions. Come in.
Karen Volkman
From “Spar”
Meet me two years earlier in the street. Omega Street. I’ll try to be
there, to be perfectly present, to get the eyes right. And the rest: the arms
and breasts and mouth, the squalid vowels. May they be gathered like
frail fruits of summer, terse and woundless.
It’s just the early, the earliness of everything…it won’t amaze me.
Precocity of the wrong word falling, bright-blind, the bottom. Bright-
early fever of distance. When it hits. If the early, the ago-ness of the
error–doesn’t late me. I will be there, will be accurately other, as right
must be. We will agree the street looks better, unbelated. As constella-
tions speak scale to the molecules. A o e
Karen Volkman
At all events, few poets are even ostensibly autobiographical; and it is hard on them to investigate them as if they were putting themselves through a process of vivisection for the public to see how they were getting on inside.
Augusta Webster
How can anyone claim: “What you by no means know can by no means torment you?” I am not the center of what I know not, and torment has its own knowledge to cover my ignorance.
Maurice Blanchot
Slept for 15 hours. Listening to the new Beach House LP and drinking coffee. It’s chilly and overcast outside; inside, the orchids are trying to stay in the game. I am trying to feign interest in Victorian Literature, I am trying to feign interest in grocery shopping and a bike ride and laundry. Sometimes life feels like a polyblend housecoat. Those days are the worst.
