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Labor as a tulip
arrays its flame, nu
form, as the bulb-star,
interred, divines its ore
surging the gulf
rooting it into
appalled memento
pulsing will.
Leaf-blades score the heap.
Other wounds—penetralia—
other worlds, cries, far.
Filaments, simples
emblazoning the rei,
rebus of grief.
Unslumbering terra
premising her kill.
Copyright @ 2014 by Karen Volkman. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-a-Day on June 10, 2014.
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Nothing was ever what it claimed to be, the earth, blue egg, in its seeping shell dispensing damage like a hollow hell inchling weeping for a minor sea ticking its tidelets, x and y and z. The blue beneficence we call and spell and call blue heaven, the whiteblue well of constant water, deepening a thee, a thou and who, touching every what— and in the or, a shudder in the cut— and that you are, blue mirror, only stare bluest blankness, whether in the where, sheen that bleeds blue beauty we are taught drowns and booms and vowels. I will not.
Laughing below, the unimagined room in unimagined mouths, a turning mood speaking itself the way a fulling should overspilling into something's dome, some moment's edging over into bloom. What is a happening but conscious cloud seeking its edge in a wound or word pellucidity describing term as boundary, body, violated bourne no sounding center, circumscription turn. Mother of mirrors, angel of the acts, do all the sighing breathing clicking wilds summon the same blue breadth the sense subtracts, the star suborning in its ruptured fields.