Robert C. Knox Verse-Virtual 2017 August

August 2017

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, Semaphore Journal, Scarlet Leaf Review, These and other journals. "Suosso's Lane," my recently published novel about the Sacco-Vanzetti case, is available at www.Web-e-Books.com.

Ice Cap Blues

O, my temperature's rising
The kitchen fan's on the blink
My equanimity's oozing
I don't know what to think
If things don't get no cooler...
Gonna drown myself in the sink

Yeah the ice sheet is melting
And the temperature's zoomed,
But tell me, brother --
How does it help us if we know we're doomed?

O, the government's planning
They're gonna burn up some coal
They don't care if Paris is burning
Chill politics is the goal
Mister President don't know 'bout learning
He's got ice for his soul

Sure I know the ice sheet's melting
And the temperature's zoomed,
But tell me, brother --
How does it help me just to know we're doomed?

I'm going up to that Arctic
Where the weather is cool
Gonna find me a seal skin
Gonna chill in a pool
Don't sign me no more petitions
...Solo survival's the rule

Yeah I know the ice sheet's melting
And the temperature's zoomed,
But tell me, brother --
How does it help us just to we know we're doomed?

While Reading "Lincoln in the Bardo"*

On a perfect afternoon,
the squirrel streaking past my head
along the top of a brilliant white fence
too fast for any objection I might offer
And the cardinal ringing out his cry of discovery,
Here! I have found the tree of the many berries,
it is Here! Here!
more berries than you could ever throw back
beneath the shears of your beak into the tomb of your gullet,
yet cannot raise an answering cry.

And then the sky, blue-blooming each new moment,
a single, entirely and uniquely linear cirrus cloud
(that high-wire act in the atmospheric circus),
built of serial regurgitations of side-by-side panels
like a kite tail of perfectly tied cotton-cloth twists,
sailing across the cerulean frame, drawn by nothing visible of earth
until, when I search upward again for the answer to the never-spoken question,
a perfectly blue and bottomless bowl
once more rides on the scalp of an invisible giant,
and everywhere I look is perfectly, eternally, alive.

*(the novel by George Saunders set almost wholly in a cemetery)

This Is My Country

The problem is 'my' country.
The problem is 'I love America.'
The problem is American-born.
The problem is the natives,
who are restless because life has not been the cakewalk
they thought it must be, given who they are.
I'm not prejudiced. Some of the my best friends are white people.
Yet even I know it's the people born elsewhere who are value-added,
life-and-death motivated comparison shoppers,
because they know what elsewhere is like
in the way inaccessible to the body and soul
of those of us who have never lived in the sort of elsewhere
that would make anyone wish to go anywhere else,
who think that everything should be easy-breezy
for 'us,'
waving our birth certificates to the smiling judge in the sky,
who for reasons inaccessible to nature, science, or mother wit
must love us best:
God bless aMErica!
Those who know better work harder, think straighter,
cling tighter to what (and whom) they love.

Do not love "my country" too much lest you come to believe
that, somehow, it belongs to you.
Many others stake claim to that deed -- and so many,
many more still to come
(unless we do something very foolish).
If you said, "This is my planet,"
where would you build the wall?

Journey to Raccoon Island

Departing an hour before the old man steals the sun
we leave behind the uninteresting: directions,
the maps of the lost Pelopian sea-states we hope to discover,
our phones,
the peanut butter sandwiches the crafty creatures
so adore,
the company's careful warnings
our ancient worries about the draft, the court, the fate of the nation
our doubts about the tangible existence of Raccoon Island,
and strike out for the mountain fast,
though the way is slow, mountains are slow,
and we must cross while the night is young.
I prefer old nights, young Knights,
aimless puddings, drinks consisting wholly of wild mint and stale water,
hours that go boldly backwards,
instructions sketched on the back of discarded envelopes
fished from the waste basket,
meetings with prior agendas which do not in fact
ever take place, raising the question
'What would Walt do?'
Answer: Four-hour work days
long, brooding walks over familiar country
easily reachable via backwards-bicycle...

Until the moment we are almost there, at the neck,
who knew islands had necks?
They seem so delicate,
vulnerable, drawing the eye of those who would harm us,
better unstuck-out.
The surf splashes sleepily, wakened too early
The fish lay the table, wearing white beneath
black dinner jackets, as if theirs were the jaws
that would soon munch on us
as we tiptoe across
to commingle with the habitues of Raccoon Island
and settle in, crouching,
our tails curled up around our shoulders,
our throats, ready to bib away the chaff of disputation,
before the tin cans of our choice.

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