Sonnet

What is this witness, the watching ages,
yield of hours, blurred nights, the blue commerce
limned limpidities the skies rehearse
dreaming their seasons, raptured in their rages.

Eventless auction the sun screams and stages
for outered spectacles that bloom their source,
or eyes are mouths and utter tongued remorse—
read me, augur, from the wrists of sages

the shocks and tangencies strangled in their veins.
Or stars are livid links in lucent chains.
Heart will read its figure in its willing

or blinded needle the compass stains;
lidless volumes and vortices of pains
distinct the dolor, and kind the killing.   

—Karen Volkman

Karen Volkman is the author of Crash’s Law and Spar, winner of the 2002 James Laughlin Award and the Iowa Poetry Prize.

Originally published in the October/November 2003 issue of Boston Review