Sonnet
I asked every flower I met
had they seen my palest friend.
The chant of the roots will beget
petals that blazon and bend
and erasable eyes to forget
the sun and the storm and the wind,
the sky which wheels in its net,
the black of the blurrest portend.
“We see in the sheerest clair
the nothing that vitals and vides.
No friend of your night and your debt
will blight our murmur with seeds
of the mortal flower, regret,
which roots in the arc of the air.”
—Karen
Volkman
Karen Volkman's
books of poetry are Crash's Law and Spar. She
teaches in the MFA program at the University of Montana.
Originally published in the September/October 2005
issue of Boston Review
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