Two Poems: Stephen Knauth
Coldwater Almanac Tell me about it if it’s something human. Let me into your grief. —Robert Frost, “Home Burial”
January Every child should own one black marble with vermillion swirls inside if only because beauty and terror lie along the same continuum and it helps to hold both in one hand. February Through a rainy windshield the balsams resemble our blue dinner candles after a night of remembering, and that finch, flashing through the woods, a soul that cannot find its place of rest. March Winter trees, exposed nerves along the gum line. The sun’s slow-motion rupture, followed by supper. Comet and chrysanthemum, they look like sisters yet husband and wife pass mute in the hall.
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Take my hand and remember: The pines are not afraid, the sea is not afraid. The Crab Nebula has been exploding for nine hundred years. April They say time softens the heart, butter left out on the table overnight. Softens and darkens, it’s true, but slow, so that it’s hard to notice, until, one morning, stepping from the shower, a single cricket drowns out the local news. Until a passing cloud unravels the best defenses. Standing on the same porch, in the same yard, Easter’s soft petals, piercing. May It’s good to see the sun shining tonight on the cold deck of the moon and then to look down and watch its frail image tremble in puddles of yesterday’s rain as I pass by. June In the garden, we keep the dark soil turned to catch what falls unbidden, crumbs from a distant feast, the owl’s last note descending silver with dew,
S T E PH E N K N AU T H
where the sky itself may fall, and rest, until it’s ready to raise above us its leaves of grace again. July As evening’s footlights fade, cicadas take up their antique instruments and play. In the marsh, the great blue heron stands in the crown of a dead pine looking down on what we carelessly call the world. He likes to crouch behind his wing at dusk, one awful eye watching. August Asleep for so long, then waking. Receiving as new the black and brown velvet glyphs between the sparrow’s wings, the halftones and overtones in the song of the Carolina wren, the real or imagined, delicate odor of quartz. To acquire the world again and this time its soft blue shadow too. To walk each day along the shoreline of your absence, to lift my hand and build a pier of words to fish for God. September Camped on the mountain tonight, red wine, black pines, remembering, without asking to— the child is gone but the light remains: brief flashes, tender yet aloof, almost eloquent, melting in time’s haze,
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like watching fireworks flare over a distant river town, waiting for the muffled cries to arrive. October She sits in the front room with her back to the window preferring to experience the world by watching shapes cast on the opposite wall, soft, once-removed, almost holy. From the shadow of an apple tree an apple shadow falls. November Hour by hour the sycamore recedes, leaves of the final text, one by one, released—an old story retold. Spent notes of the chapel bells accompany them downward. The stark light says we must return to our sources, muscle and bone, the soul’s trampled soil. Turning away, but not all the way. Restoration, isn’t that what the prayer asks? To retire, and rest in the shell of winter’s orchestral calm. December Now come the days when the flame of loss is set on high. The pea-vine sags with ice. Squirrels pick the feeders clean.
S T E PH E N K N AU T H
I gaze down on softwoods, on a manger scene no king can crucify: moon-in-pine, deep winter mind.
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American Radiator Thirty years living in this hundred-year-old house and it wasn’t until last night when I stumbled and started to fall while getting up from my desk and grabbed hold of the radiator for support that I felt them for the first time, block letters extruded in a perfect circle around the big bleed valve, on the side facing the wall, warm iron letters AMERICAN RADIATOR abiding there in the dry shadows while six wars marched by, while the worst and best that could happen did, plain-spoken words, honest words on which to fix a grip. Back in my chair I thought about the hidden life of things, and of people like me, sitting here on a winter night, watching the spilled wine darken my scattered papers.