Karen Volkman
All the
things unbluing: skies erase
actual
ether, a trace a whole could tell
to keep
its edges tender, tangible
scatter
and falter. Sere-saturate. A race
is the
pure recrimination of time to space
and
slits the sun (scar-seed that splits a shell)
and
drips its minutes, and tides a ticking swell,
lucent
liquid, drowning to fluoresce
the
skirl of radial. It clicks. It was.
It
seeps, accretes. Squalls, plurals. Blooms a bell--
cold
notes, cold audibles, as silence does
fulgurance,
calculus. If final fell--
illuminata
of the palest pause--
would
time annul the zero in the laws?
The
throat-flute uttering its constant note
of claim
and name and wake and never-same
and
nuanced cadences of sate, remote
days
translated into a breathing frame,
knows
its viewless voice is future's lend,
surpassing
present where it grows and dwells
momently,
glancing vocable, to spend
blooming
fullness as it spills and swells
in the
air ear, othered. Heard, is it the same?
Future-fathered,
present-mothered--instrument
of mute
contingencies its songs declaim
note by
note by stopless increment
in the
sounding, silenced. Audible degree
nights
the note that lets mind's nighttime see.
Mr A.
buries his past in the long noir corridors of post-war Europe, some violent
work in Tiflis, Õ27, SophieÕs gang in Warsaw till the pretty dancing girls put
her out of business, the 200K Swiss dollars burning holes, which she says were
pure gold and stolen, when Guy finally finds her in Mexico married to the
general, the sun blurring strange in the bw, the white cities gray-toned and
the heat a speculative season, what was crazy in love what was conundrum, the
gamine daughter an implausible cause, for the litter of bodies on two
continents, buying a telescope, feeding the fleas, poor Zuk never gets his
goose liver (with potatoes and apples), poor Guy donÕt get the girl, though sheÕs
beautiful, because youÕre my friend IÕll give you something, this name, dying
beneath the vast crate chalked Milano, poor Milly canÕt remember the Russian,
the masquerade, the number of years on the tombstones, empty plane circling,
the beard doesnÕt scare cause itÕs ridiculous, the money does.
The swamp simmers, the
guitar blurs.
Typhus in all of us.
Or tuberculosis
means holes in the
lungs
for gangsters and
gamines
and will alone
can kill it, the
baccillae
gathering forces like
teeming
infestations, pure
war. Night
a gray haze slurring
over
fevered Tokyo --
yakusa
plucking flowers,
dodging slippers
the mistress throws,
and the doctor swigs
alcohol
tinged with tea, but
in the end
bears gently the four
shining eggs for his
dying
friend. Cure is an
integer
of desire for life,
honor,
and the code broken
means dying in white
paint,
spat blood, slick and slipping,
almost swimming, or
drowning
as in a white marsh
unstable footing, the
lung collapsing –
there are no codes of
honor
outside care, the
angel
drunk and dirty, the
mobster sickly,
and spat blood in
black & white
a dim tone, spectral
seeping,
the dying grimace
finally
a pain-code, a frame.