Robert Knox Verse-Virtual 2019 September

September 2019

Bionote: It's been a good year for occasional verse, with 50-year anniversaries everywhere you turn. Somehow I missed the originals. I had no interest in the first man walking on the moon. I missed Woodstock, unable to get time off from a summer job I hated. I'm making up for all that here with poems about my absence from Woodstock, a more recent attempt to pay attention to the moon, and a poem in praise of Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue, which I also ignored back in the day. These days, however, I obsess over our nation's contemporary failures, writing essays for Medium.com. The most recent is available here https://medium.com/@rcknox2/just-when-you-think-public-discourse-cant-go-any-lower-trump-finds-a-new-road-to-the-dirty-d981d217685a

How I Missed Woodstock

'Uh, have you heard about --?'
Of course, everybody's heard about that
'Wanna go?'

Sure, you think the boss will understand
that for howsoever many days
I may disappear into a fathomless farm-belt upstate wilderness
of corn and soybeans and ultimate grasses
intended for the beasts of the field,
not for the longhaired hominids of the vinyl generation?
You have any idea where we'd park?
And how much did you say it would cost
vis-a-vis a weekly wage for picking plastic stock
in the Rubber Shrubbery warehouse?
...when we can always sit in the mud of your Mama's backyard,
turn our faces to the rain,
drink store brand cola and smoke weed
for pennies on the buck

'Oh... I don't know, maybe
it would be something to remember
when we're like, you know, forty years old
and looking back at our wilder days...'

Wild at heart, but trapped in flesh,
we save our pennies for a nearer treat,
darkening the streets of the broken city
and lamenting the death of a dream:
One green people, at home with
the geist of the zeit and the beasts of the field

Hunting for the Moon

First, we all get into the boat
leaving our snacks behind, our hang-ups,
life-lessons in yearning
            and hard-times earning,
songs from the center of hard-earned experience
("Hello? Center For Hard-Earned Experience?"
"...We'll be taking a short break here,
if it isn't any trouble for you...")

Then, casting off the merely material lines,
to ford the dark water
and stalk the dark and distant skies,
the green hills masked in night
seeking among the banked continents of swirling gases
that blacken the stars
the lodestone of illumination

O where, O where, is thy moony face?
There is something wrong
            with a sky,
that hides that ancient charmer,
            lovely lorn and lonely Luna

The ship cleaved the water
The sky lay thick upon the hills
The heavens closed where they oughta' been open
The dying angels of some earlier divinity smoked across the gloom!
The silence was spotted with remembrance
of old rain
Still the stars held their fires

Prepare to spend time with your thoughts,
came word from above
This dullness reminds the soul of obscure verses
of ancient songsters, the darker musings of five a.m. Ahab
The souls of the forgotten linger in the mind-tingling drear,
their song heart-rending
            like the call of an animal
whose face hides in the solitary tree sublunary
on the spit of disappointing shadows

and then, of course... there is the moon.

Thunder
"Life isn't about finding yourself... Life is about creating yourself." -- Bob Dylan
-from Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese"

How come he knew that,
and the rest of us didn't?
Rushing to the bedside of Woody Guthrie
in some forgotten rehab in an outer borough
that even Whitman failed to poeticize,
to learn from the master how to turn the magic key that
opened the treasure box of the soul
Learning, instead, then or later, that you had to find your own key
in your own way, maybe in your guitar
or in the words that buzzed in your agitated soul
or the raging egoism of a mind-of-your-own
or that funny contraption you wore over your mouth
so you could blow a few notes of differentiation,
self, and a terrible beauty a'borning

and that if you kept blowing in your own wind
studying those who had already taken the stage, so that
you could interpret it from them when the time came
and make it the platform, the raft, the golden cloud, the
shelter from the storm
you would not easily relinquish
to the next phenomenon
And therefore recreate, at need, that which you had already achieved
against the bluntly expressed desires of the masses
who needed you to be what they (we) could not be
by and in and for ourselves because we had not yet learned the lesson
of how it is done, or summoned the daemon truly enough

Then, when, like all pop idols, you stumbled and fell,
and were wounded like all the heroes of the oldest stories,
but did not die, or give up, or go to hide
in the gilded cave of retired warriors, laurels on the wall,
photos of the final strike-out in the perfect game,
and knew that you must make it new,
if the magic, the power tale, were to find its proper elevation,
you came back not merely in your own voice
but with the thunder of the masked gods in the cataclysm
that whirled the stage back into your hands
like an instrument of ancient might -- Homer's fireside,
or the ceremonial ground of tribal ritual --
and spoke and sang and stalked upon an emanation of spirit,
Thor's hammer, the lyre of the gods and
the golden tongue of their mouthpiece,
and once more wore the mask
that allowed the fool and the wizard to speak the truth

You spoke, and sang it, and shouted from rooftops
because the gods were rolling too

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