The Patriots
at the edge of the city in
the garbagedump where the
trucks never stop unloading
a crazy congregation stumbles
from trashmound to trashheap
they smash their fists down on
whatever's intact they tear
to bits the pitifew items
that have remained whole they
rip everything old clothes
papers cans bones to nothing
with their glazed teeth
the enlightened the faithful
every few meters one of them
falls and is torn to shreds by
the others at the edge of
the city where there's a line
waiting to join
poem by Bill Knott
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Threadbare (Desires)
-to S.
The light lay in shreds across the bed,
only your waking could make it whole;
resuming its costume of day, its role
which seems to overnight get ragged—
Fate latent as weights in theater
curtainhems, what soul is sewn here
to be rung down at last, divested
of these disguises. But if we are
bared by such cloth as cries in this
lament for the sun's fragility,
would I dare now to shake you astir—
to drape over you my shadow, whose
myth-ex-machina remains all mine,
mine, and therefore torn from yours.
poem by Bill Knott
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2 Futilists
Even if the mountain I climbed
Proved to be merely a duncecap It
was only on gaining its peak
That that knowledge reached me.
*
Is there a single inch--
one square millimeter
on the face of our planet
which some animal
human or otherwise
has not shit on?
Is there anywhere even a
pore's-worth of ground--
earth that has never
(not once in its eons)
been covered by what
golgotha of dung?
[...] Read more
poem by Bill Knott
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The Hunger
If a path to the Gingerbread House
could be established by breaking crumbs
off its edifice and sprinkling them
so as to find what lies behind us
across the featureless fairytale
void of childhood: yet how very quick
that trick wears out when the story's track
takes hold, takes toll, a far-older trail
prevails, we're forced to give up this lost
cause; and the fact is that every last
morsel was gone long before the you
or I might totter our way back here
to try to dissuade all these other
Hansel-Gretels hollering in queue.
poem by Bill Knott
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Picture
Meadow of matchsticks,
soon to be rekindled
by Spring the incendiary.
The exact flame of your blossoms
will ignite the passions
happily sapped by time--
Dripdrop their excess went
and now miners' hats
light up like love before
your vein, the frame of which
is there to depict the drift,
the waste when I painted
all the review copies
they sent me. But those books
open to polar pages where you
[...] Read more
poem by Bill Knott
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Self(The Poet Passé)Portrait
His task to watch an hourglass wash itself,
A ritual cleansing that leaves him bare,
Though no purification's new enough
To nullify the need for such labor--
Prior soon to repeat, platonic clone,
He should have practiced that horizon
Vocation, camouflage, opening his
Arms wide the better to hide. But of course
If the flesh is fire, bones are the kindling:
Still there but aching to be unbelied
By the lover, unbellied as breaths held
Until all the minutes fall to the wrong
End of the hour and find his final
Efforts,ve faded, dated as (or like) a sundial.
poem by Bill Knott
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Another Hole for W.R Rodgers
Speak like a singularity, a lack
residing deep inside every lock, just
past the point keys can jab: against all thrust
make safe-ensure your door's core is held back,
for reckless access to that pure center
quarks more quintessence than taking exits
from those pried voids whose secret quickly sates:
ubiquitous if Space presses Enter.
Which inadmissible sill still calls loud
with imagine: our skeleton keeping
each such portal neither open nor shut,
unhoused of that exclusive dustborne cloud
we breathe, though there must be something
it accumulates, accommodates: what?
poem by Bill Knott
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Tempestrousseau
The clock is dressed in drag, I mean it wears
space instead of its own proper aspect
but if it wore time, would it disappear
isn't visibility an effect
of transvestism, that shield pastime whose
crosscasual aim unmasks the eye: must you
assume the costume of the other to
be here, to present the sense with an ess. . .
Narcissus saw his guise decked out all ruse,
but if there were none, what would our true clothes
consist of, our rig rags, our regalia—
Whose dapper element dons us: Einstein's
continuum—or Flaubert's condence
that, come the same, the Bovary c'est Moi?
poem by Bill Knott
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Compact Dusk
Here at the height of the day night change
The color of the sky is uncertain,
The sky depending in which direction
One's eye strains, each of its swatches a strange
Hue which dies too soon and which makes this hour
Linger in the mind transient as a life,
Whose names once known remain another
Posied-up portrait on our palette knife.
Until even I wonder if one tint
Ever survives the harm of seeming unique
(Evening's intrigue, time's singularity.)
Study for its trace, its placemap, I see
— Redundant as a stopsign in italic—
The face on which my profile leaves no print.
poem by Bill Knott
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The Unsubscriber
Like all children, you were a de facto
Member of the Flat Earth Society,
Believing nothing but what you could see
Or touch or whatever sense led act to
Fruition: mudpies made summer beneath
A tree whose measured shade endowed decrees
Between light and dark: such hierarchies
Gave you implicit, a sophistic faith--
(Fallacious fellowship!)"
Youth's adherents
Ignore the fact that most factions reject
Their lyric league (which only fools have stayed
Striplings of) and none condone its nonsense:
No-one loves that vain solipsistic sect
You'd never join, whose dues you've always paid.
poem by Bill Knott
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