Create Desire
BY KAREN VOLKMAN


Someone was searching for a Form of Fire.
Bird-eyed, the wind watched.
Four deer in a blowsy meadow.
As though it were simply random, a stately stare.
 
What’s six and six and two and ten?
Time that my eye ached, my heart shook, why.
Mistaking lime for lemon.
Dressed in cobalt, charcoal, thistle—and control.
 
If they had more they would need less.
A proposal from the squinting logician.
Seems we are legal, seems we are ill.
Ponderous purpose, are you weather, are you wheel?
 
Gold with a heart of cinder.
Little blue chip dancing in the light of the loom.
Mistress, May-girl, whom will you kiss?
The death of water is the birth of air.



Karen Volkman, “Create Desire” from Spar. Copyright © 2002 by Karen Volkman. 
Reprinted by permission of University of Iowa Press.
Source: Spar (University of Iowa Press, 2002)

            "I become depressed frequently, and as far as I am concerned, in this world, much of the time anyway, depression is the only mood that makes sense.  Here is my definitive theory of depression:  It is caused by the depressing things that happen to us.  Among a great many other things, it depresses me that depression itself has been turned by psychiatry and psychology into a disease process, something the medical community tells us is 'treatable.'  Depression will never be treatable, and the reason is that it is built into the human condition itself.  Human life has very depressing things within it, and to encounter these things is to be depressed by them.  The idea that one can or should 'treat' depression makes little sense.  Sometimes I have the depressing thought that nonsense rules the world."
                                                                                                                                              - George Atwood