[She goes, she is, she wakes the waters]

By Karen Volkman b. 1967 Karen Volkman

She goes, she is, she wakes the waters

primed in their wave-form, a flux of urge

struck into oneness, the solid surge

seeking completion, and strikes and shatters

and is its fragments, distinction’s daughters

and now, unholding, the cleave and merge

the hew and fusing, plundering the verge

and substance is the scheme it scatters

and what it numbers in substantial sun.

Her hands hold many or her hands hold none.

And diving the salt will kiss a convex eye

and be salt fact and be the bodied sky

and that gray weight is both or beggared one,

a dead dimensional, or blue begun.

Source: Emblem (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2008)

Biography

Born in Miami, poet Karen Volkman earned a BA at New College and an MA at Syracuse University and completed a year of doctoral studies at the University of Houston. Her poetry collections include Crash’s Law (1996), selected for the National Poetry Series by Heather McHugh; Spar (2002), which won the James Laughlin Award and the Iowa Poetry Prize; and Nomina (2008). Her poetry has been featured in the anthologies The New . . .

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