January 2020
Robert Knox
rc.knox2@gmail.com
Author's Note:  I write poems, short stories, and novels. Also a blog, prosegarden.blogspot.com, in which I've recently been posting about the seasons, favorite poems, and the connections between them (plus photos about an enduring favorite subject: trees). Here's a link to a recent effort prosegarden.blogspot.com/2019/11/the-garden-of-seasons-that-time-of-year.html.
My poems for this issue include a meditation on late autumn feelings, and two efforts on the singular accomplishments of HD Thoreau. Both of these were stimulated by a recent biography by Laura Dassow Walls, a book I keep going back to.

The Year Matures

Each November twilight,
each gaudy, god-in-heaven splash,
every footfall coming home
adds to the quiet of the night.

The hero of the day returns
from out among the roiling breakers,
to rest in harbors of the heart,
her happiness her labor earns.

Returns when silken shadows
wrap their arms about a tepid sun,
sleep-hungry in the shorter days
night stumbles as the hours run.

The love-song in the aging heart,
the days so short time seems to dwindle—
but a fading sun still warms the flesh,
and voices laugh and memories kindle.

Old loves that flood the well-walked way,
the sun that fades still lights the path,
fingers clasp, voices laugh,
old fuel burns clean on the fallen day.

The Winds That Blew

            "Our thoughts are the epochs in our lives; all else is but
            as a journal of the winds that blew while we were here"
                                                              Henry David Thoreau

The wind of terror
of injustice, of fear
of songs we can sing if
we learn to open our mouths
The wind of the awful noise
that blows when we think the thoughts
we should not be thinking

The winds of winter need
of galled shopping
and the ritual unkindness
shown to strangers on the road
The noise of the air rushing to be heard
The winds we call news
The winds of the old reassuring themselves
The winds of loss,
faded memories, forgotten names
The winds of what we would have done,
had we known what now we do

The funeral winds that blow
in the dying of the year
The winds of flesh
Of tears,
And also of tears in the fabric
of all that has always been true

Someone is knocking, hammering at the door
with the tongue of the wind
To tell you, in truth,
That the winds are blowing
Shouting, 'what do you hear?'

Measuring Thoreau

Who knew thee, Henry T, as thou knew others?
A philosopher of science, of life both material and immaterial,
exactly observed, verbally dissected, and knowingly reported
precisely as it was seen to be and (impossible as this is to believe)
recorded in the million-word journal of your findings
Did the trees, exactingly as they grew,
embrace your presence among them?

If ever there was ever meant to be a "new man" in the New World,
it was you, Henry David, the first and only of your kind
A laboratory in your pocket
(calipers, eye-piece, fixative, elixir for seeing god in a grain of sand),
calculations approximated on the move, pencils hidden in favorite trees
Recording the exact dimension and measured volume of the Concord River
besides which, in childhood memory, Penobscot tribeswomen
camped some weeks in summer to gather reeds
for weaving, as your gathered facts, for writing.
And now, the river dammed — "who hears the cries," you demand,
"of the bass," trapped to expiration
by the gates of the Billerica Dam
"What liberation," you consider in that many-volumed journal,
"might be achieved by the application
of an iron bar?"*

Direct action in abeyance, eco-terrorism before its time,
you wrote the environmental Bible instead,
for politics and nature were but one for Henry T.
The finds of that pocket-laboratory — seeds, acorns, wildflowers,
tiny crustaceans — specimens mailed to the newly founded
Harvard Museum collection,
gratefully received, the foundation of a worldwide-research basis
for the political revolution of universal love —
Agape!

Your head for figures so exacting,
New England's most precise surveyor
plum-bobbed, by god, to measure
the depth and circumference of Walden Pond,
his state's deepest inland water body
for his own satisfaction, later surveying original railbeds,
and a hundred other destructions and constructions — for money —
(for his writing, guess what, lost rather than made Yankee dollars)
while knowing that his paid and perfect labor
would help destroy habitats he had known,
grown into, and closely loved

Cutting holes in the ice to prove that Walden
had indeed the bottom denied to it by legend.
Cutting still more when conventional wisdom wrongly held
that every inland water body would freeze solid
for months at a time,
and that every US citizen (after The Compromise of 1850)
was legally bound to assist a slave-catcher in returning lost "property"
to its rightful owner,
a kind of frozen politics

And so extending, as you ultimately did,
the reach of humankind's ethical norms
to the little gods of earth, air and sea,
flinging them skyward to the songbirds of the moral law,
encompassing the segmented millipedes crawling at our feet,
and the stranger at our door,
who on certain nights you northward drove
to follow the drinking gourd...

Exceeding, as you did,
all common measures
of a man.
Facts and quotes in this poem come from Thoreau's journals as cited in Laura Dassow Walls' biography Henry David Thoreau: A Life.
©2020 Robert Knox
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