Monday Poems: "The Gold Book" -- by Karen Volkman

It told the story of a runaway rose

that fled trellises, hedges, and the safety

of the master's shack for a life of abandon

in a town down the mountain, till the repressed

one-armed giantess packed her shears

and went to hunt.  You recall the rest

only in shreds--the long travails of the giantess,

dark windy nights, a loud tavern where soldiers

bounced the blithe rose on their knees 

and called it Betty.  The inevitably violent end.

But what happened to that clarity of detail

you once knew?  The thin book sported toothmarks

and a child's hieroglyphics, pages frayed

and smudged at the edge from too much turning.

You think the vanished facts of the story

must take their place in the continuing

erasures of your life:  forgotten knowledge

and grammars, lost love, sensations and responses,

all heaped democratic in some dank

chaotic attic, with the occasional tantalizing

reminders to bait you, the way you remember,

years later, forgotten dreams at stoplights.

Or how as a child, carried drowsing from the car

by your father, you felt the prickly, solemn

pressure of a father's chest, and for the first time

felt yourself feeling, as if from a distance, and knew 

you were somehow more than what was held.

Now you wonder that all you've forgotten

is already greater than what you contain,

a life conducted under skies

blunt and inexpressive as a giant's wrist.

Songs rise from the tavern to the valley

where vengeance waits, a fate shown

by the simple absence of a rowdy rose,

who at this moment carves initials in a table,

laughing, careless, as you struggle to picture

the specific, lurid end.  Did the giantess

use the shears?  Which arm was missing?

*     *     *     *     *

Karen Volkman is Associate Professor of poetry at the University of Montana -- Missoula. Her first book, Crash's Law, in which the above poem appears, was selected for the National Poetry Series. 

Her second book, Spar, received the Iowa Poetry Prize and the 2002 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her most recent collection, Nomina, was published by BOA Editions in Spring 2008. She has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Society of America, the Akademie Schloss Solitude, and the Bogliasco Foundation.