Robert C. Knox Verse-Virtual 2017 November

November 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.

Nineteen Sixty-Eight...
(After watching 'The War in Vietnam' on PBS)

begins with the Tet Offensive
appointment television on the news every night
for a violence-loving audience
But I wasn't watching TV in 1968
Radical Youth got high in the single room of our
graduating senior mentor
listening to Country Joe and the Fish on the campus radio
("first ones on your block/ To have your boy come home in a box")
On the domestic front P. and I have begun sleeping together
while my roommate H. and I have become draft resisters,
turning in our draft cards to the university chaplain
after marching on the Pentagon to 'Confront the Warmakers'
and sit in on the steps of the Pentagon, arms-clasped,
as our comrades were beaten, arrested, hauled away,
awaiting our turn which, somehow, never came
Late winter on Long Island P. confronts me
with her desire to get married
I hesitate, equivocate, placate, negotiate, prevaricate,
demonstrate -- 'first you love me, then you hate me,
it's a game for fools' --
'twenty years of schoolin' and they put you on the day shift' --
Our future, like everything else, is still undecided
when MLK, the nation's latter-day prophet, is destroyed by a bigot
(really? or a Ku-Klux-Klan made-for-TV movie?)
prompting Bobby to ask,
'What kind of country is this?'
Cities burn

When the NYT reports in a headline "European capitals fear
for the stability of the United States,"
the news is greeted in our sect
as a sign of hope and progress
Next we watch (finally somebody rounding up a TV)
as Johnson, whom we hate, whom we call baby killer
in the famous chant,
will not 'seek office' again, throwing open the future
Stunned.
'He can't run,' our mentor enlightens,
'because he can't speak anywhere but military bases.'
'Why not?'
'Because of the protestors!'
So, are we actually winning?
Was it the war's bloody stalemate, King's execution by the racists,
or McCarthy's vote in New Hampshire that gave LBJ the hook?

The season-of-the-witch year, sparks of hope stomped out as soon as lit, only accelerates
Though I confess ambivalence to H. and refuse to act happy,
P. and I are bonded as soon as I turn twenty-one,
the age of consent in New York State, that bastion of progress,
waking the next morning in New Haven to hear on the radio
that Kennedy has been shot
Why are they telling us this old story?
...Oh... it's Bobby…

That summer the Democratic Party destroys itself,
choosing a candidate who represents all that has been discredited
in order to soothe the old guard, the fat men and party stalwarts
who served in the war my father fought
(Dad insisted that I maintain my deferment, keep out of trouble:
if only he knew)
but refused to learn anything about the new one
and thus hung the stalemated slaughter around their hypocrite candidate's neck
My now ex-roommate and another cat who likes to make the scene
attend the follies in Convention City
I am married and must stay home
What did you do in Chicago? I later ask
'We were running the whole time'

1968: Year of the Murders,
and the madness, and the rituals of immaturity
The year the VC proved the war is pointless, yet does not end
In the last cold months of dread fatality
the new reptile crawls into the White House
I take a dirty train to the local draft board in the abandoned hometown
where I recant the heresy of resistance
to the old folks, minor cogs in the Wheel of Death, who in their wisdom
(sending somebody else to get killed instead)
welcome me back to the fold, the prodigal's return
And so I will not heft an M16 for Uncle Satan
Or end my college years behind bars
or In Another Country

As for those who die that year in Asia
or in the spoiled American cities
I seek still to earn your forgiveness,
as do we all, we survivors of no special merit

The 'Symbiotic Community' of the Forest

They know us from the roots
They talk about the weather,
exchanging chemical news
When their fungal fibers clasp hands in the morning
The sky is theirs, to do with as they wish
Appendages finger the air
and take hold of aerie elements
invisible to other eyes,
their thousands of greenie digits
flying in place through the winds of the world

Stalwart defenders of the right to grow
nerves probing deep in the hidden land of subsoil
amid glacial memories of the icemen
who walked the earth
the dominators, rulers of the shape of things
until we came along

Tendrils flipping through the library of time,
they know us from the taste of earth
the rain with its acid tinge
the smoke of the ubiquitous compounds
of the ceaseless back-and-forth
the dry rain of transport

They know us from the leaf,
the air, the color of the lights
the bent, frazzled music of our passing,
the foot-dragging alterations of our artificial suns,
our many, many star-chambers fixed on imitation trees
made of their dead,
shiny heads upon their stakes
their flesh flensed and wound about the quadrants of our dwellings,
great woody bandages defending the empty air inside

They know us by their buried nerves
streaming through arterial currents
the tidings of the under-earth
They know our flavor, and our angry moods
Our burning love to be somewhere else
Our burials, our hidden wastes
Our smokes, and floods of mineral leaks,
our fences and our wars
They know, and still they turn
their flesh-fed banners to the sky

(After reading "The Hidden Life of Trees' by Peter Wohlleben)


("The wind hears what the universe says
and we hear what the wind says...." -- Octavio Paz
But who does the universe listen to?)

The Universe Listens To Us

Somebody has to provide the feedback
The universe is a huge feedback leap
Leap right in, folks
I'm dialing the universe this morning
with an update:
Warm, unseasonably, but to my taste
Monsters, however, are prowling the corridors
of the high offices, have suborned the high priests,
the Seers wring their hands
the Furies roll the dice and rub their broken bones
with glee, knowing each number is a winner
They plan vast feasts of rotted flesh,
but which side are they betting on?

Universe, you must hear me
Your line is ever so busy,
fouled with solicitations and survey requests
and offers to borrow money as if tomorrow
            will never come
It will, won't it?
In your case tomorrow always comes
In ours, not so much
And we rely on your ineffable wisdom
to send the appropriate glaciers when the planet
            needs cooling
When hotheads gain power over the Doomsday Machine,
Universe, do you have a moment for this little world in a far-off corner
            of Everywhere,
enjoying the attentions of a minor sun
with a remarkable shelf-life so long
that not even those of us who complain about everything
can imagine harping at the loss of its rays,
… do you, Universe?
How old you are, how much time you have,
I have no standing to ask

You send us dark seasons, no doubt, to look at ourselves
and discover we have changed -- lost color,
dimmed in our own light, grown creases and spots
We have wrinkled our reputations
Our follies are spread to the ends of creation
Are we the machines to sit in the city square,
with our life studies
brushed crudely in broad strokes of regret,
fear, and beseechment
in the electronic sands
of a ceaselessly quarrelsome existence?
We have spent our souls
for 33 pieces of peddler's costume-glass beads
in which to reflect upon the greatness
of other lives we are yet to live
If only you extend our sun (or 'run') to another season
The prophets are lined up already behind me, Universe,
pushing to get in
They want their final moments of infamous Confrontation
with the be-and-end-all
represented in our pitifully limited minds, by You:
            Thinker of all our thoughts
            Begetter of our existence

Universe,
            Will we join with you in some
not so distant state of
            ultimate embrace
leading, as we both begin to get a little bored,
to a new cast of characters
on a re-imagined, subtly toned and overdrawn setting
of tension and beauty, and love around the corner
            and green hills stretching across horizons
unthinkable,
mountains blue, blooming valleys,
oceans of multi-dimensional creatures
unimaginable by name…?

except that they stretch before me
            even now
Universe, listen to me with both ears unplugged,
            You are doing beautifully
as you have always done

It’s us I am worried about.

(Thanks to Octavio Paz, Tom Montag and Jim Lewis)

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