Karen Volkman

Karen Volkman was born in 1967 in Miami, and received degrees from New College of the University of South Florida and Syracuse University. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Boston Review, Chicago Review, New American Writing, and The Paris Review. She is the author of Crash’s Law (Norton, 1996), a National Poetry Series Selection, and Spar (University of Iowa Press, 2002), winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Volkman has received awards and fellowships from the Akademie Schloss Solitude, the NEA, and the Poetry Society of America. She has taught at Columbia College Chicago, The New School, the University of Alabama, the University of Chicago, the University of Pittsburgh, and elsewhere. Volkman now lives in Missoula, Montana, and teaches in the University of Montana MFA Program.

[Now I promise…]

Now I promise the shriek that the pressure of days, the pressure of days will be weapon. We drive and we drive, we blare music, we go on. On the highway of our lost intentions, all signs are strident, all exits goodbye.

Who’s that voice? A wound in a wheel-spin? Speed—which I love like an orphan, dear dazed infant of my most present caress. Lord, I am loving your children, the antic and plastic and plausive, the caustic and restive, the everyway raw.

Think: our limbs are straight, our wings tattered, our tempers blade. Still—a starling rustles in your temple, mutant mystic. Still—a something shudders in your fingers, when you sing. That there are—yes, no, then, never—pieces of plan and purpose. That they stay.

[If it be event…]

If it be event, I go toward and not back. I go tower, not floor. I listen but rarely learn, I take into account occasionally, but more often there are lips to kiss, words to pass from tongue to mouth, white entire. It knows a few names about what I am, it goes door to door saying She is or Her ire. But when the rainbows are handles I hold dragging earth to more vivid disasters, oh swinging by the strap. You thought she was a dimwit flapper, really she’s a chemist with a taste for distress. You thought she came with guarantees, really she’s your nightmare hatcheck has a vagrant head. I sort of sometimes go by the book, the need to move being visage, mask you wear like dark sky or water (water that boils or breaks or scares the flame). We don’t need a nest to grow in, a bed to sleep. In the clairvoyance of loving wrongly, o glass pillow o swallow, is dream is dare is dagger. Your turn.

The Case

Old wolf, I said,

leave a tatter

for my family,

a scrap, a rag,

a bone, a button—something

to bury.

Because, I said,

I’ve chased

the fast fox from

the henhouse, and twisted

the livid blossoms

from failing stems,

mercy, spare a rag,

a bone, a button,

for my family.

And because, I said, I sang

the names of saints

on Sunday, and lay

with another woman’s

husband Monday eve, leave

a scrap, a rag,

a bone, a button—

to bury.

And he said:

It will take

whatever it is given. It will

be still.

May

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.

Kiss Me Deadly

1.

How do they get so close to the window,

a tree in figment, arithmetic moon?

Summer broke you, winter builds you—

a lofty leafage in the prism, a pure

empire. Where they’ve ghosted roofs

on the drawings of infants—

because I did leave a letter, small map,

semblance. Tarnish the mirrors,

they will not shield. And wound

this ribbon round my fingertip,

to keep you.

2.

Should it be better, going off, grim-

visaged indigents, tinny mimic stars?

Two things love a third—hosting a harbor

in the brokenest guitar.

Two things leave a remnant—its sound

and space and silence shrill and wide.

3.

Two things torch a fragment.

When did the moon grow an eye?

I speak from a shameless seance,

a blue-lipped winter that mutters and broods.

I move in a blowsy specter,

a gap-toothed slattern with a curse and a cry.

Let’s give the lily a scissor.

Let’s smash the cup and saucer,

spill the wine.

4.

She moves, she means, she masters.

She deems, she dooms, she stammers.

Schools, and schemes, and skitters,

rumors, raptures, rathers. She aspires.

She did, she don’t, she daren’t.

She shall, she shan’t, she shouldn’t.

Hooped and looped and latent,

she doth, she loath, she mightn’t.

She make, she moan, she silent.

She gave, she grieve, she amn’t.

She behave.

5.

Though intentions erode like the moon,

they are still as ghostly, as noble.

Someday to sing it with champagne and sherry,

in a gauze gown, tonic,

stippled with perfume.

An opera of Edens. A synaptic how-come.

In this boomtown boudoir, baby

you always wrong.