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We are a public forum committed to collective reasoning and the imagination of a more just world. Join today to help us keep the discussion of ideas free and open to everyone, and enjoy member benefits like our quarterly books.
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, author of Crash’s Law, Spar, and Nomina, teaches in the MFA program at the University of Montana, Missoula.
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