April 2019
Robert Knox
rc.knox2@gmail.com
rc.knox2@gmail.com
NOTE: I'm copping out on the difficult task of offering an unambiguous selection of 'my best poem,' a voluntary theme for this issue. Long ago, writing poems before I published any, I produced a poem with a favorite title: "The Last Man." It was an image befitting my then central themes of solitude and estrangement, a perceived alienation from most of my fellow humans inhabiting both tiny rural hamlet and big city. I'd sampled both. I don't have that poem any more. Instead, I've tried updating that loner stance through imagining the condition of a solitary, de-gendered survivor in a world ravaged by the climate apocalypse toward which we are stumbling, eyes wide-blinded. I then attempted to rhyme these notions against a vision of "the last man" both to know from experience and to prophesy for the American wild, Henry David Thoreau.
I. The Last Man
(Shee/he
the last 'man' on Earth
thinks 'it's kind of lonely here'
with nobody much left...
staring accusingly in the bathroom mirror:
We knew this was coming)
How many eyes does he have?
which head do the creatures see
when they look upon the approach of the other?
which foot the best to put forward?
where to put his hands
-- all of them?
What of the scent he leaves on these premises,
the home of that unmistakable perfume,
the bone rot of infinite solitude?
He cleans his shoes with dusty walks,
fills his lungs with every hour's darkling spite,
hides in his bed of unwashed rags
lest anyone (but who?) observes that his
sheets have stood up and left,
giving up on him
as he has given up
on so many things
his ineptitude
his car sobs in the night
his stars pick his pocket
he follows the eyes of yesteryear's teenagers
in imaginary streetcars
hours so late that no one notices where they go,
or where he goes,
or where shee/ goes
without him
though he longs to follow--
believing he will always be in love with Teddy Bear
Sweatshirt
in the distant, broken down non-future that beckons --
being as he is the last half-man/woman on urth
ii. Memories
The Last Man washes his hands in the air
the last man combs his hair,
hoping some day to find a way to remove it
All this tsuris because alone in a city
of haunted souls --
City of half-forgotten sufferings!
he smells trace elements of the baked meats
of dull and ordinary long-gone evenings,
reminders of commonplace contentment
in the Hall of Plebes
and wishes he was one of the guardsmen,
the bored, anonymous soldiers
bidden to stand outside the door, eight-nine hours at
a clip, while the consiglieri
plot against one another inside the rococo chambers:
Has he found his people at last?
The Last Man walks the rooftops,
breathes the city scenes below
Ah, magic hours!
(he recalls a few)
spread thinly between the stretches of neglected desert
-- arising like some ghostly image out of spiritus mundi --
he calls his home his work his purpose,
his short days' labor
sometimes, at intervals,
his 'job.'
Do your job.
The tri-syllabic invocation lingers in the void
This way he persists
His country the ether that encircles his head
as he tunnels through the waking noir
others may call the night --
out of habit
Still better, however vacuous, than dreams:
Dreams wake him with strange voices --
what is it? who's there?
Have you come, at last, to take me away?
Who, then, has spoken?
Is it I, Lord, truly I?
The Last Man on the only planet
Shee/he
in the wash of no-time, nowhere
winds rising, the tempest
of the ghostly
whisper
II: The Last True Man
(Henry David Thoreau on his father's death, 1859: "I perceive that we partially die ourselves through sympathy at the death of each of our friends or near relatives... Each such experience is an assault on our vital source."*)
Thoreau knew everyone
He knew Frederick Douglass,
He knew John Brown
He tutored the children of Ralph Waldo Emerson,
his sometime mentor, who prophesied for him a great career
as the first truly American poetic genius,
then switched to Walt Whitman
He took walks and talks with Bronson Alcott,
who ended up in Concord with his authoress daughter, the one who, happily, paid the bills,
and another who, unhappily, died (but lives forever in "Little Women")
Thoreau knew her too
Horace Greeley was his de facto literary agent,
and even he couldn't make the conscience of America a best seller
He knew the Abolitionist preachers, of course,
and Harriet Tubman dropped by, off the record
He knew Irish laborers, Harvard presidents,
fugitive slaves, forerunner feminists -- Margaret Fuller edited
his youthful essays and scotched his poems
Later Henry T looked for her effects after the Fire Island shipwreck took her life
He knew the first Henry James, father of the revered novelist and of
America's most famous philosopher
He knew railroad men and lawyers, local farmers, doctors
with their bad news
and perhaps not the last, but one of the finest exemplars of the last generation
of Penobscot hunters and fishers, the newspaper-reading Polis,
who butchered before him the carcass of the moose he had killed,
sickening Henry
while winning the white nature-lover's respect for his native mastery of the wild.
He knew scientists, botanists, zoologists to whom he served up
a new species of fish, which they neglected to name
for him.
He corresponded with European naturalists
on the life and death of forests, pioneering the science of forest succession
He conceptualized the first public park
and surveyed the length and depth of the Concord River,
where the dam, and the farmers' croplands, washed away the wild, green "river meadows"
that Henry could not save
He loved winter, that stirring "poem of earth"
and found each early spring the new crop of disinterred arrowheads,
"humanity inscribed on the face of the earth"*
calling these a "mindprint" of the earliest generation
of humankind
And yet in his own last year
saw himself as a relic and the earth a fading flower,
its bounty everywhere abused and assaulted
from the trade in animal skins, feathers, and shells,
to that of human hide and skin and muscle and African bodies
We pen up the freedom of the wild, he railed, declare ownership of the trees,
damn the river to the ruination of its banks, privatize the blueberries,
and go on owning people,
"in such a snarl and contamination do we live that it is almost impossible to keep one's skirts clean." *
We dig in the graves of Indians, he protested,
and cook our food in their ashes
Alone, a prophet poorly honored in his own century,
widely branded but little read in ours,
he prophesied the great calamity of the loss of the wild within,
where we grow our soul
From which disaster, the country of Lincoln and Roosevelt,
Morgan, Ford and the Klan,
struggles to rise
while the midgets and clowns of our own day
destroy what the heroes and martyrs have
saved from the ruins (dirtying their hands
to spare the babe from the bath),
their daily betrayals ever weakening the chain of connected souls
Alone, each one of us, at the
end of things,
we clasp hands across the void.
(*quotations come from Henry David Thoreau's "Journals.")
I. The Last Man
(Shee/he
the last 'man' on Earth
thinks 'it's kind of lonely here'
with nobody much left...
staring accusingly in the bathroom mirror:
We knew this was coming)
How many eyes does he have?
which head do the creatures see
when they look upon the approach of the other?
which foot the best to put forward?
where to put his hands
-- all of them?
What of the scent he leaves on these premises,
the home of that unmistakable perfume,
the bone rot of infinite solitude?
He cleans his shoes with dusty walks,
fills his lungs with every hour's darkling spite,
hides in his bed of unwashed rags
lest anyone (but who?) observes that his
sheets have stood up and left,
giving up on him
as he has given up
on so many things
his ineptitude
his car sobs in the night
his stars pick his pocket
he follows the eyes of yesteryear's teenagers
in imaginary streetcars
hours so late that no one notices where they go,
or where he goes,
or where shee/ goes
without him
though he longs to follow--
believing he will always be in love with Teddy Bear
Sweatshirt
in the distant, broken down non-future that beckons --
being as he is the last half-man/woman on urth
ii. Memories
The Last Man washes his hands in the air
the last man combs his hair,
hoping some day to find a way to remove it
All this tsuris because alone in a city
of haunted souls --
City of half-forgotten sufferings!
he smells trace elements of the baked meats
of dull and ordinary long-gone evenings,
reminders of commonplace contentment
in the Hall of Plebes
and wishes he was one of the guardsmen,
the bored, anonymous soldiers
bidden to stand outside the door, eight-nine hours at
a clip, while the consiglieri
plot against one another inside the rococo chambers:
Has he found his people at last?
The Last Man walks the rooftops,
breathes the city scenes below
Ah, magic hours!
(he recalls a few)
spread thinly between the stretches of neglected desert
-- arising like some ghostly image out of spiritus mundi --
he calls his home his work his purpose,
his short days' labor
sometimes, at intervals,
his 'job.'
Do your job.
The tri-syllabic invocation lingers in the void
This way he persists
His country the ether that encircles his head
as he tunnels through the waking noir
others may call the night --
out of habit
Still better, however vacuous, than dreams:
Dreams wake him with strange voices --
what is it? who's there?
Have you come, at last, to take me away?
Who, then, has spoken?
Is it I, Lord, truly I?
The Last Man on the only planet
Shee/he
in the wash of no-time, nowhere
winds rising, the tempest
of the ghostly
whisper
II: The Last True Man
(Henry David Thoreau on his father's death, 1859: "I perceive that we partially die ourselves through sympathy at the death of each of our friends or near relatives... Each such experience is an assault on our vital source."*)
Thoreau knew everyone
He knew Frederick Douglass,
He knew John Brown
He tutored the children of Ralph Waldo Emerson,
his sometime mentor, who prophesied for him a great career
as the first truly American poetic genius,
then switched to Walt Whitman
He took walks and talks with Bronson Alcott,
who ended up in Concord with his authoress daughter, the one who, happily, paid the bills,
and another who, unhappily, died (but lives forever in "Little Women")
Thoreau knew her too
Horace Greeley was his de facto literary agent,
and even he couldn't make the conscience of America a best seller
He knew the Abolitionist preachers, of course,
and Harriet Tubman dropped by, off the record
He knew Irish laborers, Harvard presidents,
fugitive slaves, forerunner feminists -- Margaret Fuller edited
his youthful essays and scotched his poems
Later Henry T looked for her effects after the Fire Island shipwreck took her life
He knew the first Henry James, father of the revered novelist and of
America's most famous philosopher
He knew railroad men and lawyers, local farmers, doctors
with their bad news
and perhaps not the last, but one of the finest exemplars of the last generation
of Penobscot hunters and fishers, the newspaper-reading Polis,
who butchered before him the carcass of the moose he had killed,
sickening Henry
while winning the white nature-lover's respect for his native mastery of the wild.
He knew scientists, botanists, zoologists to whom he served up
a new species of fish, which they neglected to name
for him.
He corresponded with European naturalists
on the life and death of forests, pioneering the science of forest succession
He conceptualized the first public park
and surveyed the length and depth of the Concord River,
where the dam, and the farmers' croplands, washed away the wild, green "river meadows"
that Henry could not save
He loved winter, that stirring "poem of earth"
and found each early spring the new crop of disinterred arrowheads,
"humanity inscribed on the face of the earth"*
calling these a "mindprint" of the earliest generation
of humankind
And yet in his own last year
saw himself as a relic and the earth a fading flower,
its bounty everywhere abused and assaulted
from the trade in animal skins, feathers, and shells,
to that of human hide and skin and muscle and African bodies
We pen up the freedom of the wild, he railed, declare ownership of the trees,
damn the river to the ruination of its banks, privatize the blueberries,
and go on owning people,
"in such a snarl and contamination do we live that it is almost impossible to keep one's skirts clean." *
We dig in the graves of Indians, he protested,
and cook our food in their ashes
Alone, a prophet poorly honored in his own century,
widely branded but little read in ours,
he prophesied the great calamity of the loss of the wild within,
where we grow our soul
From which disaster, the country of Lincoln and Roosevelt,
Morgan, Ford and the Klan,
struggles to rise
while the midgets and clowns of our own day
destroy what the heroes and martyrs have
saved from the ruins (dirtying their hands
to spare the babe from the bath),
their daily betrayals ever weakening the chain of connected souls
Alone, each one of us, at the
end of things,
we clasp hands across the void.
(*quotations come from Henry David Thoreau's "Journals.")
© 2019 Robert Knox
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