April 2022
Bio Note: Two of these poems are on family matters, a recent death, and a revisitation of an early triumph by my mother. The other treats a familiar April subject, spring. My recently published book of linked short stories set in the early 1970s, titled House Stories, is available on Amazon. My op-ed piece on Putin’s war on Ukraine is on medium.com
My Mother Writes the Gettysburg Address
It was like something out of Borges*
The handwriting as regular as if produced by a printing press
or today, of course, a digital replication
Each letter distinct, clearly formed,
meeting all the requirements of the Palmer method,
or some more local standard,
I suspect, though my word cannot be taken for such matters,
being the sort of ‘writer’ from whose hand whole words
sometimes emerge without a single knowable letter,
a kind of mere smear of intellection
that some latter-day, more patient me is expected to decipher
But not Mom,
whose two neatly filled pages of cursive are letter perfect,
proportion-perfect, punctuation distinct, spacing exact
No word missed or malformed
No deviation from the standard of excellence
created by that other excellence of composition in Lincoln’s
verbal serenade,
indeed enhanced by the steady-handed inking
of these so perfect words
And whose offering of her own perfection was rewarded
by the splendidly legible “100”
clearly posted at the top
of this enduring page of American prose
by a long-unnamed secondary-school instructor:
Mom’s own handiwork undated, timeless
We can recover Lincoln’s dates
more easily than Mom’s
On what ordinary some-such Tuesday of the scholarly week
did the Baldwin, New York public school task her
(whose family, of course, had come down in the world)
with producing a faultless rendition of the famous document?
A task she accomplished with perfect attention.
A deed I do not believe I could ever achieve:
Unsteady fingers conjoined with restless mind …
Had they all – how many young scholars in the room?
Twenty-something, thirty? More? in a prewar suburban town,
old Yankee-founded village not so far from the shore –
met the same exacting standard asked of Mom so perfectly
that nothing short of a pronouncement of perfection could be rendered
upon this act of diligence, care, and concentration?
And when we contemplate those nameless others
who work so exactingly
in whatever salt-mine existence the prison-door of circumstance
has sentenced them to serve, and locked the door,
I celebrate you too, mes freres! – deserving, each,
to receive your one-hundred measures of perfection –
and now proclaim that you may all
“Go out to play!”
*Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine surrealist wrote “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” a short story about a man who copies out by hand the entire text of Cervantes’ great novel and signs his name as author.
Spring, Again
Eating Greek kebab sandwiches, the food of a sunny clime
on the banks of the Ipswich River
Friends, again, in the broader light
of a peek-a-boo season
Day lingering each day a little longer on the treed horizon
of the reputedly better place
just a short way now over the hill
Again, the shedding of garments
suddenly too warm, discarded in the broad afternoon.
The freedom from all that protective armor
too jealously hugging the skin
And again, the sudden disappearance of that old pal,
Banksie: the whitish, frozen, dirt-flossed sort
Roads still rugged with their pocked-frozen skin,
punchy from the latest round of the seasonal wars
Our bodies a little shell-shocked as well
from the thousand little prickings flesh is heir to
Spring, when the clock lurches forward again
to face the lengthening light
Season of roused possibilities
The obligation to embrace
what was given, without asking,
what is offered, without a signature,
or a warrantee
Spring, which takes upon itself,
with no formal greasing of the palm,
the slim green pointers rising from the wasted earth
like infant fingers
Paradise for Today*
The baby was, well, a baby
The women stayed to mind it, care for it,
mold it, humanize it,
make it a child, a daughter
She sat in her highchair
pudgy fists making sense of a tray
The grandfather and I left the women to talk
and climbed a gently elevating path through woods
to a local hilltop view
The laurel, blooming before the birth, faded now,
white petal waste with hints of pink like baby flesh,
pink-fingertip promises of red-letter days to come
The view was pleasant, the day mild and sunny
We shared the walk, our thoughts our own,
an easy climb with a grandfather in mind
two men in a rural space, no one else about
Coming down, I chose a short detour
to a resting place, a different scene
where we could sit upon a bench and look upon
a still blue pond
The view in early summer dress,
the water smooth, unwrinkled as infant flesh
The air soft as a chance remark, a shared cliché
The land greened over with a new year’s growth
There, he remarked, to the silent place –
empty and marvelous, as the Buddhists say –
“I have found my paradise today”
*RIP Leonard Meyerson, 1924-2022
©2022 Robert Knox
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