January 2019
Robert Knox
rc.knox2@gmail.com
rc.knox2@gmail.com
Bionote: I'm the author of two chapbooks. "Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty" has been nominated for a Massachusetts Book Award for best books published in 2017. "Cocktails in the Wild" was published earlier this year. I'm also the author of "Suosso's Lane," a novel of the Sacco-Vanzetti case. The "Calendar Poems" below started out as three-liners, some of them haiku, but in most cases I just let them grow. .
Calendar Poems
January
More Snow Coming
Blue snow at twilight
The silence of the day.
On our daughter’s Beirut balcony
the bougainvillea grows new leaves.
February
Icicles Bar My Window
‘Snew?
Snow!
Snow what?
New snow swallows the sidewalk
Now our car’s snowhere
March
I Get a Big Bang Out of You
So, in fact, the Big Bang begins this time of year
every year in these very latitudes
just ear-splittingly so.
Some pushy, flap-happy leaf baby squeezing
its shape from the primordial enzyme-concatenation of plant-ness
to breathe the sun and eat the air
From winter wood, dry, lifeless, comes life,
leaf, growth...
blossom ... fruit
The whole big frigging bang,
regardless of degree days, spitting rain, raw wind and
an accelerating need to get my skinny butt indoors
before it freezes.
APRIL
Approach the Maiden With Care
Maiden Grass:
Cut, the books say, in early spring
You always pay with a little blood
May
Everything at Once
The green rush.
Like watching a picture develop,
the original time-lapse photo.
All the warts show up too.
The plant called Spring Vetchling
(a minor complaint?)
has a lively red-violet flowering,
like a scream turning happy.
June
Diversity in the Garden
On hot days
the smell of hamburgers
bloodies the air.
It wakes the carnivore
in everyone.
I go forth
to eat flowers.
July
Vampire Sun
O Rose, thou are Quick
The terrible Star that Shines
At the Noontide sucks your Blood
August
Nightnoise
Darker already.
Put your arms around us,
demon lover,
never let us go.
September
Cicadas
When darkness falls, by inches, millimeters
Then all at once the cicadas grow louder
We know that things are
as they always were
As insects are,
in league with a seasonal point of view
How could they be otherwise?
October
What the Trees Know
Roots sunk in rock
You wait for winter winds to shake
Your heart is ever green
November
Raining Birds
Beautiful trees, birds
Their calls falling through chill hours
Yellow leaves like rain
December
Bare Statements
Where did the day go?
Over the hill, a pink streak
Fingers tree the dark
© 2018 Robert Knox
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