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    Whereso
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    Ebook117 pages46 minutes

    Whereso

    By Karen Volkman

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    About this ebook

    Known for the transcendent, abstractionist poems of Nomina, Volkman's newest collection returns to tangible experiences of the body—its range of expressivity and physical movement in space. Where is the body in travel? What space does it occupy in dreams and memory? With rich perplexity, Whereso responds to dance, performance, and position in time—translating flight of the body into language and line.

    Karen Volkman is the author of Crash's Law, winner of the National Poetry Series; Spar, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize and the James Laughlin Award; and Nomina. She teaches at the University of Montana in Missoula, Montana.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBOA Editions Ltd.
    Release dateMay 16, 2016
    ISBN9781942683094
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      Book preview

      Whereso - Karen Volkman

      ONE MIGHT

      One might start here, with the blank specimen, not thinking too much or wanting to go home. Entrance is ample, the peak of the blank, a kind of acme in the ether. And what if you said No ceasing! No respite between night and pen. But it’s not night yet, nor even crepuscular later, no haze blights the light, not yet, though the cycle progresses, you know it, contain it, know how it’s measured in the movements of thought and body. Circadian authority, and also the way time breaks things, or is broken. Certain measurements portend that at such time in the morning . . . So many voices of requirement, regiment, the authority of this or that strident device, fetters that tap on the skin’s head and need an answer. Why such indignation in violation, old friend? Who is addressed with these questions. Ghosts of persons. Sometimes the desire for contact can be a certain color, transparent or opaque, or clearly clear. Is clearness a color, or another form of smudge? Ocular weather is every kind, all times. Power dreams in its frame. In a pasture, boys lost in the wheat, the high grown weeds. By land or by water. O Athena, Medusa, pick up the phone! There are ropes and routes and other things to hold. Avert your eyes, sweet sisters, call in phenomena with the medium in hand. Apparatus, deuce of minus. Too much has been left to the tendency, the message, the flowers bursting and bowing on the verge, allowing all their semblance of edge to flash and measure. But a plot, we want a story, a root to grow and figure. Let’s see, she’s asleep, in a bed so big one mistakes it for a sea. Birds beat at the window, holy hibou and humble alouette. Stars and birds bide their colors, weave them in the tapestry that is desire’s web at evening, a dark blue hearkening inundates the land. One approaches, bearing lantern. Is it the monster or Psyche? Is our sleeping sister really a sinner, or hermaphrodite hiding the secret sex she dies in? All quiet, all sweet, all needle-bright and bleeding. That was what we came to, that land, that stain, that blissful kindness of a liquid called forgetting. From its insides, distill a new sequence, a process that pleasures its textures with a certain soothe. Or sooth, for we include bright wisdom in the process, not the one of the foolish harridan, her mouth a ruin, but that which springs from the thought’s throat like a sheer shade of begot. And all those things, those times of the evening, collected in inkspots and nightbells, like a thread—keep saying, I am doomed in the stains I shall remember, they lay forgotten heads on the canopies, like a dress that spreads to every corner of the stage. Ring down the curtain, cold auditor, all is numen, an unctuous light activates the hand, and every act loves the strange blue weight of its attending. So far, so failing. What do we entail? A new contract or gambit, mask of antiquity with all its spectrum of stare and frown. And grin, the one hanging in the air like a lantern. Sometimes space needs a sectioning, a kind of break in the turbulence of its hastening, le vertige. Kiss the question, it’s your longlost sweetheart come to see you! I need a horse to escape, to bear me through the storm. I don’t like the story, the end is too heavy, a child plays near the train tracks, make it stop! Some Russian catastrophe bearing all away. Mine would be the black bread havocked at evening, crude anchor of the norm. Five, six eggs in the basket, the hen is ailing. Rain eats the roof. Night spies land. It was sailing

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