"The Gift" .  Artist: Sarkish (Latvia)

Little Epiphanies

The difference between what’s required
and what’s desired is the difference

between the chocolate and the cake,
the car and the new car smell, the nightie

and the night. There’s so much I want
to twist round my fingers, to stroke

and stir, sketch and stretch, but so much
I should sweep and scrub, strip

and sterilize.  But I’d rather wring dirt
from my pores, turn it to ink instead,

rather scurry to my driveway to study
the moon’s abrupt phrases than kneel

with bucket and mop to banish shadows
that have sprung up on my kitchen

floor, darkening my soles as if I were
anointed, a kind of low-rent henna

for the lazy and uninhibited.
I should keep the unmentionables

unmentioned, nudity prohibited,
purses to a minimum, but I thrive

on clutter—my gaudy bras and bags
of yarn, my malfunctioning pens,

last chance reams of slightly damaged
paper. The difference between what’s whole

and what’s held, what’s withheld
or revealed, what’s real and what’s

revelation—that’s what I seek,
rest of my life spent in search

of little epiphanies, tiny sparks surging
out of the brain during the clumsiest speech.

~ ~   Allison Joseph

Valparaiso Poetry Review, Fall/Winter 2009-2010, Vol. XI, Number 1.

stud 

newborn
leggy colt struggles to stand
first of many challenges

~ ~ Judi Van Gorder

Ghost Hawk.  Photographer: Trane DeVore


 

Imagine

walking up forty-two stairs,
the smell of a rubber ball, your arm
brushing against a stucco wall,
the prick of a pin in the tip
of your right index finger.

There was a clock you once knew,
draw its tick inside your body.
There was a bicycle on a dirt road
the summer you fell in love,
balance on its handlebars.

Enter a room you have forgotten.
Walk through midnight
carrying a make-believe lantern.
Stretch out your hand,
touch the horizon.

~ ~ Ruth Bavetta

ZONE: International Journal of Poems and Prose
(April, 2010).

Fisherman and Sons.  Artist: Donna Crosby

Fisherman

A man spends his whole life fishing in himself
for something grand. It's like some lost lunker, big enough
to break all records. But he's only heard rumors, myths,
vague promises of wonder. He's only felt the shadow
of something enormous darken his life. Or has he?
Maybe it's the shadow of other fish, greater than his,
the shadow of other men's souls passing over him.
Each day he grabs his gear and makes his way
to the ocean. At least he's sure of that: or is he? Is it the ocean
or the little puddle of his tears? Is this his dinghy
or the frayed boards of his ego, scoured by storm?
He shoves off, feeling the land fall away under his boots.
Soon he's drifting under clouds, wind whispering blandishments
in his ears. It could be today: the water heaves
and settles like a chest. . . He's not far out.
It's all so pleasant, so comforting--the sunlight,
the waves. He'll go back soon, thinking: "Maybe tonight."
Night with its concealments, its shadow 
masking all other shadows.
Night with its privacies, its alluringly distant stars.

~ ~ Kurt Brown

From: More Things in Heaven and Earth (Four Way Books, 2002).
 

Cobalt Field.  Artist:  Warren Gossett

farm auction -
the gavel falls
on his dreams

                        playground
                        a popsicle wrapper
                        skips in the wind

~ ~ Warren Gossett

Fidelidad 

Envejecer otro año en la colonia
veraniega.
Pero ni dos amantes
sensatos entorpecen la trama
hostil del eucalipto.
Como en una acuarela frente a un grupo
de aprendices de crítico,
poniente abre una herida
entre los piragüistas.
Se me ocurre que somos caracoles
en una espiga, dos
piezas arracimadas
en el puño de conchas
sobre el tallo amarillo
violando alguna ley de la materia.

~ ~ Carlos Pardo

Echado a perder [Spoiled], (Madrid, Visor, 2007).

                Fidelity 

                            To age another year in the summer
                            colony.
                            But not even two sensible lovers
                            slow down the hostile
                            weft of the eucalyptis.
                            Like in a watercolor in front of a group
                            of critics in training,
                            west opens a wound
                            between the canoeists.
                            It occurs to me that we are snails
                            on a sprig, two
                            pieces pressed together
                            in the fist of sea shells
                            on a yellow stem
                            violating some law of matter.

                             ~ ~ Carlos Pardo

                             Translated by Curtis Bauer 

                             First published in The Dirty Goat #25.

Dance of Life 2.  Artist: Anatol Knotek

Questions about Love

From what I have heard of love,

People don’t give their heart.

Our heart flies from us,

And we can choose to follow or not.

                    -- From “Translations”, by Brian Friel.

I too have heard tell of love,

The stories speak

of something solid, something

with body, something

we can hold tight

against our frightened chests

like a living heart.

Other stories tell

of love as blood, loss,

or even war, where some

never come back, babies never get born,

painful things, not something

I would ask for.

We must be born wanting

this love business.

Perhaps its indigenous state

is other than

what we’ve been told.

Perhaps it’s like fresh olive oil, cut crass,

cool dew or new wine

that tastes of mango and lemon.

It could be the freak storm

when the rain fell horizontally

or Sophia who flew straight

through the customs barrier

into my arms.

Or perhaps it was

the thick black clouds

of sweeping swallows

that circled my quiet house

for days, settling on the grass,

In the almond branches, all over

the roof as if the pepper pot

had flipped over, and then,

suddenly, gone one morning.

I think love might be

the fragment of a poem

that comes to one while walking

between spaghetti and ham

in the market by the metro station,

and the rush to get home.

And the days afterwards

of telling it over and over

until it is right there, alight

on my fingertips.

~ ~ Becky D. Sakellariou

Earth Listening, Hobblebush Press, 2010

Followers.  Artist: Lea Kelley

The End 

Oblivious, the holy man of God's
Voice unctuously tries to put at ease
Each desultory listener. He lauds
Redemption at my somber obsequies.
Mark how he speaks of hard-earned paradise,
Yammering in his sober self-restraint:
Deliverance from evil, sacrifice,
Effusions both of angel and of saint,
As if this Earth were not the world to me!
Despite it all, it's all I've ever known;
Be slow to throw away my ecstasy
Of fire, air and water, blood and bone.
Death may have come to hurl me heavenward,
Yet love shall live and lie unsepulchered. 

~ ~  Catherine Chandler

The HyperTexts, 2005.

Ca şi cum, glissando
 
Departe de unde mã aflu,
pragul de fulgi arginitii
cerne spaţiul stelelor cârcotaşe

-         ca şi cum –

ca şi cum totul n-ar fi decât o simplã ezitare de a exista

sub globuri mãrunte, adunate în luminã,

si mansarda lor, un solstitiuce
reverbereaza intr-un timid glissando
cu tonul
unor ploi ce-abia incep.

 ~ ~  Irina Moga 


                                     As if, glissando 

                                     Far from where I am

                                   the threshold of silvery flakes

                                   sifts the space of crumbly stars

                                   -    as if  -

                                  as if this was a mere reluctance to exist

                                  below orbs of fused sunshine,

                                  its attic, a solstice

                                  that resonates, in a timorous glissando,

                                  with the tone

                                  of incipient, make-believe rains.

                                  ~ ~ Irina Moga 

Upheavals 

The February 27, 2010 magnitude 8.8 earthquake in Chile moved Earth’s figure axis by about 3 inches, affecting the Earth’s rotation, shortening its days, and moving the city of Concepción at least 10 feet to the West. (from NASA website)

The dire catastrophe — the flood, the quake,
the hurricane — is hailed as breaking news;
but unreported wrecks — the hearts that break
more quietly, those worlds of Waterloos,
those galaxies of grief, of x’d-off days —
outnumber each spectacular kaboom!
that shocks and awes and tends to paraphrase
the terms of our unmentionable doom.

Our children, too, will one day come to know
that there are strings attached to happiness
and to the puppets in the puppet show;
that subtle shift in rapture when they’ll guess
at Something Out There which in time devours
the careful crust of uneventful hours.

~ ~  Catherine Chandler

The HyperTexts, 2005. 

 ©Copyright Catherine Chandler

First published in The Flea, October 2011.

Too Late to Cry.  Artist:  Lea Kelley

Pond

How it resembles a myth in its inner shining
a little kingdom         a sunken palace of weeds

within its borders       silence and the unknown
you may enter it briefly         if you stay you die

~ ~ Kurt Brown

Agni Online, 2008.

Three Horse Heads.   Artist:   Robert Joyner

Horsemen of Afghanistan

Flesh against tanks,
I saw them streaking
across the TV screen.

The horses,
once the pride of the north,
butter-fed, pampered and prized.
Bred for endurance and speed,
trained to be one with the chapandaz
to excel on the field
of the Buzkashi.

A way of life, a culture lost.
Equestrian royalty
used as antiquated tools of war,
to be sacrificed
by terrorists, imperialists
and those of us who think
we can offer a better way.

~ ~ Judi Van Gorder

A Knock On The Door

They ask me if I've ever thought about the end of
the world, and I say, "Come in, come in, let me
give you some lunch, for God's sake." After a few
bites it's the afterlife they want to talk about.
"Ouch," I say, "did you see that grape leaf
skeletonizer?" Then they're talking about
redemption and the chosen few sitting right by
His side. "Doing what?" I ask. "Just sitting?" I
am surrounded by burned up zombies. "Let's
have some lemon chiffon pie I bought yesterday
at the 3 Dog Bakery." But they want to talk about
my soul. I'm getting drowsy and see butterflies
everywhere. "Would you gentlemen like to take a
nap, I know I would." They stand and back away
from me, out the door, walking toward my
neighbors, a black cloud over their heads and
they see nothing without end.

~ ~ James Tate

Published in Shroud of the Gnome, The Echo Press, 1999.
With permission.

中秋節…
我打開窗戶
讓寂靜逃逸
 
~ ~   劉鎮歐


                        Moon Festival…
                        I open the window
                        letting out silence 

                       ~ ~  Chen-ou Liu

                       Published in Ardea #2 (1912). 

                                                                                             
                                                         does it matter
                                                         if it’s been done before ...
                                                         blue night

                                                        ~ ~  Chen-ou Liu

                                                        Published in Fri Haiku 2 (Summer 2012).

 

War Child. .  Artist:  Michael D. Edens

the start of the war—

Through bare branches I spy on
my neighbors’ houses

                             Spring evening.

                             The wheel of a troop carrier

                             crushes a lizard.

                                
                                       
                                                     Young grasses ...
                                                     A mountain bleeds from a helmet
                                                     full of dreams

~ ~ Dimitar Anakiev

"Abstrakt".  Artist:  Maria Kondimäe.

The Ambiguity of Clouds

Never mind, the clouds say
as they drift above her. Never mind.
When you first heard as a child,
you thought they meant

let it go, don't fuss about it,
believing the phrase implied
all would be fine
if you didn't obsess, if you didn't
let things fester.

Time has taught you another
meaning; death has taught you,
loneliness has taught you.
It's never the mind

that gets you close to beauty,
the first and last of things,
or any of the wisdoms you long to know.
There's no word for what can take you there

though it has something to do with the eyes of horses,
the body's workings,  whiskers sandpapering across a cheek,
a woman's laugh loud enough to bend a row
of ripening wheat. Who laughed
like that and when? And where were you?

Never mind, never mind,
is it possible the clouds say that,
mindless as they are? All
if you can call them that,
cumulative and shifting shape,

mare's tails, ephemera, fish bones,
a lung bleached of blood,
an inky brain, not thinking,
just folding and refolding all afternoon
long sheets of rain. They never mind.

~ ~ Lorna Crozier
 
Published in Small Mechanics (McClelland & Stewart Publishers, 2011).

~ ~ Ruth Bavetta

 From Rattle #29, Summer 2008.

Four Short Poems

 ~ ~  slowly I eat up a spring day quickly dissolving

                
              ~ ~  single married single again a rushing river

                                        ~ ~ gnarled trees 
                                               should I tell her
                                               what's on my mind

              ~ ~ drifting laughter ...
                     the eyes
                     of a street dog

~ ~ Chen-ou Liu 劉鎮歐

Beach Shadow.  Photographer: Bob Arnold

Let there always be

the bright juice of oranges,
sun on the kitchen tiles,
a small nonessential bird
unraveling morning,

silvery snail trails, blue iris,
the gopher, the palm tree, the goat
that found its way into the house,

pigeons stitched onto telephone wires,
the clear sound of the sea,
a time when everyone is away,
a plate of milk, a tin of strawberry jam.

But never again the open gate
to the empty house down the street,
the algae drowning
the abandoned pool,

the man who stood by the edge 
beginning the dirge.
The still water.  The small
blue shoe.

~ ~ Ruth Bavetta

Antiphone, Issue #2, Winter 2012. 

FEATURED POET SERIES, Issue No. 1

July 2012

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

 Poems and Art by

~ ~  BILL  KNOTT ~ ~

The Rain Effigy

Besides its breezes, the play of whose yield
is greater than day's, we feel the sky as
prior, as pilgrim. The cleave in our love
leaves a field or bare place for where to build.

Strangely energized by the windshield
wipers, animated by each stoplight's
imperative, by every presence other
than our own grown so absent, we drive

toward the horizon, that groveled traveler.
And we ourselves might kneel before ourselves
if all our effigies hadn't crumbled/decayed

to a bare/stoop pedestal. That stance of us
as we kissed was not as statuary
as we had planned, was it. Less foot less firm.

Three Short Love Poems

~ ~ The trafficlight on Lovers Leap never changes to red.

~ ~ Your nakedness: the sound when I break an apple in half.

              ~ ~ Love almost always waits for its terms to

                     become vague before it starts.
                     Me—you.     

To a Dead Friend

mourning clothes worn
inside out
would be white
if things were right
if opposites ruled

if truth prevailed
then me and you
would be two
instead of the one
we've become

Haiku

raindrops windowpane
I can't see myself wearing
more daring outfits

Site Echoes

Circling a tree with people
to protect it from people,
to add another arc
to its years may not suffice.

Hold poems up as the bulldozers
come, claim your lines
are rings nearing the core
of a word for wood for all the earth lifts.
 
It will not suffice.  Far
from its aureole bole
your whirl grows whole
only in ground;

Weeds.


               In Sleep

                       We brush the other, invisible moon.
                       Its caves come out and carry us inside.




Boy at the Mirror

A child emulates what he can't know
is true, a murderous dew
that appears every morning to be
his face, but already it evaporates at

a touch: the lurking effects of
the unity granted by night are never
enough to maintain this ripeness called
time, this waking up to a cherub-scope

that looks back at him in the glass growth
like hammerblows a devil checks off
a list—the routine begins so early

and even the wattage of the womb
behind him is too bright, too ready
to hale an unsought self into sight.


To Live By

Work from the original toward
the beautiful,
unless the latter comes first
in which case
reverse your efforts to find
a model worthy of such
inane desire.

Even the mouth's being
divided into two lips is
not enough to make words
equal themselves.

Eavesdroppers fear
the hermit's soliloquy.

Wake up, wound, the knife said.




          
          Footnote

                 All of us who lived on earth
                 and all our loves and wars
                 may not appear at all
                 in the moon's memoirs.





Painting vs. Poetry

Painting is a person placed
between the light and a
canvas so that their shadow
is cast on the canvas and
then the person signs their
name on it whereas poetry
is the shadow writing its
name upon the person.

 

The Cycle

what's the use
waking all night
to write down truths
which dawn quite
easily refutes



Babblegate

In early childhood an act
consists of another act,
a multiplying chain of
this and that.  Cat, windowsill,

sunlight, they're all events instead
of sights, but eventually they
too give way to the eye.  Time
distances the other senses

until one becomes intent instead
of intrinsicate.  That's why
dimensionally I can only

try to run toward the place
I've already passed, squealing
ba ba ba ba ba ba buh!

Poem

See the unicorn’s empty sword,
how its lack takes place
in a lack of place.

Nothingness is its own niche.

                                           

                   Unspeakable

                                 A comma is a period which leaks.

(L)ID
 
Each time I blink
Is a lapse in my life.
Each blink outlives me.

The one I was before
The blink is never
The one I am after.

And the one I shall be
Desires me to cease
Quenched with each crease
Instant of the lids.


An eye juggled on
The tips of its own
Lashes might see
Who I have been then.



                          My River

                          The closer it gets to the sea the more
                          it aches for its source, the wound
                          that sprung it from the ground.



Questions

Before we're born we're
lowercase, and after we die,
we return to it. Only life
renders us in capital letters.
(Every headstone ms.
should really be edited
by clones of e.e.cummings.)

Life is caps for the usual reason,
an exaggerated sense
of the significance
of one’s thoughts.
Life is a Beat poet.

Upper existence or
lower nonexistence,
I’m sure the eye adjusts its focus
towards either case—
But which is easier to read—
greatness or goneness,
headline or poem?
Life or its foreword-afterword?

Mishap Message

I bandage my wristwatch
to stop the bleeding
of time but time
is perforce the wound
out of which space empties
Einstein's bag of marbles

the greenie I shoot at its sister the moon
the purey I bury with a note saying no
the blue one weighs in my hand
as light as sky minus earth
earth of course is the last marble

I like to hear it roll
around my showerstall
before I fall into the drain
into that distillate of distance we call
ocean

whitecaps whitecaps
beneath each of which
a nurse bobs up and down
cold fingers hold my wrist
cold toes probe my throat
is that my pulse I ask
sisters is that my life
is that the onomatopoeia of the waves
words that jumble space with time
laughter tumbling down a telescope

words that turn to marble all I say
white as my years they bleed
they bleed away
white but white as only Einstein's
hair is white
or a note slipped under drowning doors

 

The Balloon That Lived on the Moon

The lower gravity was kind to it
It could bounce and soar higher
Than Earth allows
So the balloon was happier
By far
And soon forgot the puncture culture
We perpetuate down here
Where the hate-pins of our eyes skewer
The frailest inflation
The beadiest bubble is not safe

But up there
The bleak unpeopled landscape
Mirrrors more faithfully
A balloon's own sterility and
Essential snootiness

Consider
What a round object by its perfect nature
Excludes
How its boundaries segregate the in from the out
And show what is enough
And what is less

So when you think of the balloon
That lived on the moon you might wonder
Why all its brothers and sisters
Because can't you feel how
When one tugs your hand
Deft with that upward urge how much
It resists your touch
How endlessly
You are not a part of it



State Dinner

The diplomatic corps doles and controls
these photo ops that show how treaty works—
their peace party pops with as many corks
as it would take to fill the bullet holes
in the bodies of all the people they
negotiated away in trade today.


In Order

the dead you
wrote about
in order to
forget about
so you could
write about
the living are
still living there
where you aren't

The Retrieval

In order to recapture
the features of the one
lost, one must gaze
first into nothingness—

in which the semblance
encountered should
be blank, so it can flit
across the screen of

expectation, and wither
all the images there:
as we scan the past for
someone any the same

we see must be cipher
enough to erase that
old recognition which
we hold in our mind.

The search necessitates
losing the present to
the degree we pursue
its opposite.  The ratio

may not be exact, though,
and we may lose more
time than we regain,
the numbers may not

even out. There can be
an excess of loss, a gap
that greets us when we
return to our senses

clutching whomever
we've brought back to
this void which can't
be filled by the thus

recalled person no
matter how beautiful
they hover here now
in place in face of us.




                SUMMER DAYS

                  a butterfly with a sandwich
                  bite out of one wing flies away
                  from the inhabitoads of our shadow
                  or tries to

Rock Picked up from the Beach

To focus on thing, thing whatever it is,
in some cases a mountain, an object
somewhat more intimate for most of us—
a fate transformed then framed into a fact

plucked from a beach full of rocks the same size
and shape, not much to distinguish it or
confer more meaning than perhaps the eyes'
choice, the hand's: what justifies this favor?

Nothing.  And nothing is appropriate
for something common chance has snatched from
phenomena's moment, its montage pace

down the page.  One word leads to the one right
for it: that's right.  One can reach out random
or one can wait until it's in its place.

Death

Going to sleep, I cross my hands on my chest.
They will place my hands like this.
It will look as though I am flying into myself.

The End
                   Pain has petrified the threshold.
—Trakl

A threshold is everything that can be
seen in the space of the endurance of
our openness: thus at the conclusion
of The Searchers John Wayne is framed never

to return and forced to spur himself, to
escape always the outward-gazing-lust
of that thrust doorway toward the horizon
or so we guess because the door shuts and

cuts him off before he attains it: exit
is lost and we who had followed his flight
from the intimacy of this interior, we
must remain here minus our male-myth-ranger,

and must domestically cry for his exile
while the credits crawl across their reelsill.

Slum Scene

poor children sharing
back and forth their one
set of Dracula’s teeth—
here even the dead
live hand to mouth


To Myself

Poetry

can be

the magic

carpet

which you say                                           

you want,

but only

if you

                   

stand willing                                           

to pull

that rug out

                                  

from under                                           

your own

feet, daily.

          The Final Word

                 Our farewells lack the plausibility of our departures.

The Hunger

If a path to the Gingerbread House
could be established by breaking crumbs
off its edifice and sprinkling them
so as to find what lies behind us

across the featureless fairytale
void of childhood: yet how very quick
that trick wears out when the story's track
takes hold, takes toll, a far-older trail

prevails, we're forced to give up this lost
cause; and the fact is that every last
morsel was gone long before the you

or I might totter our way back here
to try to dissuade all these other
Hansel-Gretels hollering in queue.


Empty

I look harder
in my wallet
than in my mirror
I already know
what it holds

                                                

        
                  Long candle, ponder, short candle, think.

TESTAMENT

You know the fable

How a soldier's bible

Kept in his jacket pocket

Stopped a bullet

But that catechism

Born to foster schism

Also stopped his heart his

Mind from finding peace

He would not have had need

Of such a shield

Nor would his blood have been

Thrilled to kill someone

Of another faith

If in that book he had not first read death

A Lesson from the Orphanage

If you beat up someone smaller than you

they won't (and histories prove this) tell

look at those people on the opposite side

of the planet: they want to beat us up but

they're smaller so that's okay.  Not okay is

that most of us will die in the war between

them and us, because small equals (and mice

prove this) sneaky: their spies could spirit all

our nuke aids away and we'd never know—

nick our rocket-satellite knockout Star Peace

Comcodes right out of our shrinking pockets

even our doomsday (the FBI can prove this)

doodads, the ones we mean to use on them,

the rats: and so when they kill us will we

have killed enough of them to win, whose

fist figures bigger in the end?  And what's it prove?—

In the Orphanage, hell, even if they do tell

on you there's no one to tell it to.

 
                            The moon is your past, sea,
                                     which is why it stirs you.
                                              Each tide is a memory.

Another Cold War Poem

So what if you lived only
One second longer
Than we
Did: to us
You will always be known as the Survivor.

POEM

The brow is the face’s map,

on which can be read

the twists and turns it took

to get here. Yet the seams

and cracks on one’s footsoles

show that only through detour

can the road reach itself.

Group Photograph (The Early Years)

Most biographies of the Moderns share

A common pose: ranks of raw youth appear

Often capped and gowned, uniformly there—

It looks alike in all suchwe read.

Torn from some album somewhere, its focus

Is general: all the figures are crushed

Anonymously together and lost—

Just, some airbrush has dinked a single head.

Imagine rummaging through raindrops on

Transmundane panes and eenymeenywhile

Plucking from amongst them 'Source of the Nile'!

How of this many is there but one self—

Whose underneath name obtains its caption—

In book beside book, on shelf after shelf?

LAMENT

A bruise there was, which

Prospered on stale blood;

But growing smaller, the bruise became

A lecturer in escape-routes,

A philosopher of loss; relying

On the body's reluctance to be

Normal, i.e. immortal, it

Had hoped to survive somehow—

As a useful parasite perhaps, draining

The self's hidden wounds,

Masking its aberrations . . . but no.

For always there is no mercy for

Anything that is not whole,

That begs (like the brain) to be alone.

                 Fingerprints look like ripples

                            because time keeps dropping

                                    another stone into our palm.

                                                 

CELEBRATION (dodecasyllabic)

The conversation-pit is filled to the level

Of the floor with the soil of former parties here—

Crushed cigarettes, napkins, all kinds of cocktail swill—

We stand at its edge, grinning, wondering who's there:

Is there some version of us lost in that rubbish.

Such a Pompeii probably took years of soirees.

Where's the carpet to cover it—dense, bottomless,

It makes the livingroom around it seem empty.

And why get superstitious—why greet our fellow

Guest from way across this trashhold—since we must know

Its surface could bear our most intimate meetings.

Oh, somewhere the host is winking working elbows,

Showing no embarrassment—but here we have grown

Sober over the grave of what greater gatherings.

                in the end we flow

                            like thirst above stones

                                   like hunger above air.

First Sight

Summer is entered through screendoors,

and therefore seems unclear,

at first sight, when it is in fact

a mesh of fine wires

suspended panewise

whose haze has confused the eyes . . .

What if we never entered then—

what if the days remained like this,

a hesitation at the threshold of itself,

expectant, tense, tensile

as lines that crisscross each other

in a space forever latent

where we wait, pressed up against

something trying to retain its vagueness.

POEM
 

See how the unicorn's empty sword,

how its lack takes place
in a lack of place.

Nothingness is its own niche

               

              Searching it goes

                        alone at night,   

                                —my beacon of ashes.

MINOR POEM

The only response

to a child's grave is

to lie down before it and play dead 

[UNTITLED]

Silence disguises itself

as vowels, but the loudness

of consonants is also a ruse,

a mask worn to betray

the words we chose to say

only for their echoes.

                                    CRAFT

                                          lay the tragic mask
                                          atop the comic mask

                                          snip out the parts
                                          where they don't match

                                          then take this overlap
                                          make a third mask

                                          a superfluous mask
                                          a mask of excess

                                          a mask that is useless
                                          that has no purpose

 
                                                      unless of course it is
                                                      the appropriate one

                                                      to be placed on both
                                                      your first and final face

Directions

A kite in the shape
of a map floats
over the land it depicts,

               but at night no-one sees
               its roads at the end
               of which a child feels

                                his hand tugged upward,
                                disappearing
                                in salutations.

Untitled
 
you wake up only when
the dream you're having
can no longer come true

you wake up only when
it's the same old you again
and not that dream person

you wake up in suspense
at what will happen next in
the dream that just ended

POEM

please don't scold

the kids who hold

lollipops up

for the raindrops

to lick at on

their way down

what a waste

but imagine the taste

of rainbow thunder

if you could get

your tongue up under it

All poems and images here

 copyright by Bill Knott, all rights reserved.  

____________________________________________

Salamander Cove has previously posted Bill Knott's poems and art  here. His artwork has been archived online here. 

A gracious Thank You to BILL KNOTT  for his kind permission to share these

 poems and paintings here today.

"Sonnet" by Bill Knott

Music: "Meditation Impromptu 1" by Kevin MacLeod.

Visuals and interpretation by Chelsea ("Musical Marionette").