July 2016
Robert Knox
rc.knox2@gmail.com
rc.knox2@gmail.com
I am a husband, father, rabid backyard gardener, and blogger on nature, books, films and other subjects based on the premise that there's a garden metaphor for everything. Still utopian and idealistic after all these years, I cover the arts for the Boston Globe's 'South' regional section. My poems have been published recently by The Poetry Superhighway, Bombay Review, Semaphore Journal and other journals. Some poems were also accepted for the upcoming anthology "Peace: Give it a Chance," and a collection of poems (titled "Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty") will be published in 2016 by Coda Crab Books. "Suosso's Lane," my recently published novel about the Sacco-Vanzetti case, is available at www.Web-e-Books.com.
Author's Note: The Sacred Way referred to in the second poem, is the path you took in ancient times to put your question to the Oracle at Delphi. I think of these poems collectively, about Greece, pleasure, the pursuit of perfection and the problem of death, as an approach to The Sacred Way.
Old Men
After watching bearded, pony-tailed, pot-bellied motorcyclists
dart into mid-morning Athens traffic,
I think of Yeats' verdict on Ireland,
"This is no country for old men."
They should come to Greece.
Old Men
After watching bearded, pony-tailed, pot-bellied motorcyclists
dart into mid-morning Athens traffic,
I think of Yeats' verdict on Ireland,
"This is no country for old men."
They should come to Greece.
Walking With Alexander
The olive trees hug the hillsides,
thick as dandelions,
while at the Monastery of Hosios Loukas
birds nest in holes left between bricks
for what conceivable purpose
but to challenge the prayers
with their ceaseless worldly note?
Frisking black goats,
their horns the shape of seashells.
their bells the sound
of centuries,
side-kick at the road side.
Who will wake Pan at his hour?
Walking with Alexander
on the sandal-smoothed steps
of The Sacred Way,
be careful not to stumble.
The olive trees hug the hillsides,
thick as dandelions,
while at the Monastery of Hosios Loukas
birds nest in holes left between bricks
for what conceivable purpose
but to challenge the prayers
with their ceaseless worldly note?
Frisking black goats,
their horns the shape of seashells.
their bells the sound
of centuries,
side-kick at the road side.
Who will wake Pan at his hour?
Walking with Alexander
on the sandal-smoothed steps
of The Sacred Way,
be careful not to stumble.
Boat Ride for Mom
We should have taken this trip for you, Mom
Water so blue it pours from a paint set
You always liked the idea of a boat trip
Two hours to the first island, not Bermuda,
where white people of your generation always went
because conditions were spotlessly neat and perfect,
giving proof to that idea of perfect order you scrubbed away at
while the kids were at school
But Hydra, perhaps, the motor-free pearl of the Saronic isles,
so wholly silent the shadow of a cat begging for food beneath your table
is reality's hardest knock
beyond the occasional odor of corruption from the casual enslavement of donkeys,
those ancient uncomplaining beasts of burden,
unlike you, Mother,
(or me; or anyone else I've ever known)
achieves the mark
The white of the houses,
so glistening unworldly pure, yet the order of angels who
live there grows almonds, corruptible fruit
rising from walled gardens
and visitors dip their toes in green translucent water
reflecting the color of happiness
bathed in the light of lifted burdens,
the color of well schooled fish feeding on chlorophyll
beneath the wands of bougainvillea
at six separate and numbered beaches
while their burdens are magically transported skyward
by those stolidly uncomplaining donkeys, uphill
on the invisible wings of mammalian patience
Like you, Mom, tackling the laundry?
...well, not really.
How about a boat ride?
(your voice, or mine)
Wouldn't that be fun?
On board, the heartless grief-free engine submerges
the mutter of fast-moving water, molecular in its
escape from use, its eternal freedom,
and the green-capped island hills roll by
like play-things of the gods, matter left out in the rain,
or substance cooled then baked beneath the steady sun,
to the humped and mottled toes of giants
Later, after the second island,
when the sky fuzzed with haze,
like a glaze of sorrow, or regret,
reading, 'This is not the life I meant to live,'
when a mysterious mist
arises from the water,
turning the mingled shoreline of man-land and eye-land
a ghostly blue-gray,
a single pinky of white triangle in the distance
reminds me of why we have come
and why you could never come
and why the boat ride of thwarted expectations
has only a single, shadowy destination,
the unheard aubade to re-awakened pleasure,
and the solitary descent beneath the waves
We should have taken this trip for you, Mom
Water so blue it pours from a paint set
You always liked the idea of a boat trip
Two hours to the first island, not Bermuda,
where white people of your generation always went
because conditions were spotlessly neat and perfect,
giving proof to that idea of perfect order you scrubbed away at
while the kids were at school
But Hydra, perhaps, the motor-free pearl of the Saronic isles,
so wholly silent the shadow of a cat begging for food beneath your table
is reality's hardest knock
beyond the occasional odor of corruption from the casual enslavement of donkeys,
those ancient uncomplaining beasts of burden,
unlike you, Mother,
(or me; or anyone else I've ever known)
achieves the mark
The white of the houses,
so glistening unworldly pure, yet the order of angels who
live there grows almonds, corruptible fruit
rising from walled gardens
and visitors dip their toes in green translucent water
reflecting the color of happiness
bathed in the light of lifted burdens,
the color of well schooled fish feeding on chlorophyll
beneath the wands of bougainvillea
at six separate and numbered beaches
while their burdens are magically transported skyward
by those stolidly uncomplaining donkeys, uphill
on the invisible wings of mammalian patience
Like you, Mom, tackling the laundry?
...well, not really.
How about a boat ride?
(your voice, or mine)
Wouldn't that be fun?
On board, the heartless grief-free engine submerges
the mutter of fast-moving water, molecular in its
escape from use, its eternal freedom,
and the green-capped island hills roll by
like play-things of the gods, matter left out in the rain,
or substance cooled then baked beneath the steady sun,
to the humped and mottled toes of giants
Later, after the second island,
when the sky fuzzed with haze,
like a glaze of sorrow, or regret,
reading, 'This is not the life I meant to live,'
when a mysterious mist
arises from the water,
turning the mingled shoreline of man-land and eye-land
a ghostly blue-gray,
a single pinky of white triangle in the distance
reminds me of why we have come
and why you could never come
and why the boat ride of thwarted expectations
has only a single, shadowy destination,
the unheard aubade to re-awakened pleasure,
and the solitary descent beneath the waves
©2016 Robert C. Knox
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to tell him or her. You might say what it is about the poem that moves you. Writing to the author is the beginning of community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -FF