Sample Poems by Lynne Knight
Prologue: Living Apart
My mother is not a woman I can ask about sex.
Her body is like a building she has driven past
on the way to somewhere else, not paying
much heed. She knows the major stories,
but that’s about it. Until she fractured it last year,
she had no idea where her pelvis was.
She speaks of her insides, her plumbing.
But she is not a stupid woman,
so I can talk to her about need.
She knows about the spirit, having lived apart
from the body for so long. She says I mustn’t be
too greedy. She loves me, but then there is the world.
The cold place, she calls it. If I could talk to her
about sex, I could ask her if she thinks I crave
the spirit like a lover who just uses you,
takes and takes and then leaves—
if that’s what she means by my greed.
We all need something, she said the other day
when I visited. She was looking out at the woman
who walks up and down the street all day long
like someone who’s lost her door.
The poor soul, my mother says, and waves,
though the woman can’t see her.
I want to know if the hollow my mother feels then
is the same as I feel after sex, like watching
someone lose the body altogether in the distance.
But when I talk about my lover, simple things
like how he fixes salmon, a little lime and butter,
cilantro, my mother looks away, as if I’m talking
of sex in disguise. So instead I sit quiet, like spirit,
thinking if I practice living apart from the body,
my greed for hers won’t break me when she’s gone.
Beware
The fortune teller took my mother’s hand.
Bony fingers, warts so long they shook.
She had a blue wool scarf around her head,
a deeper blue tied at her throat.
Beware the numbers eight and one,
she said, bony grip on my mother’s hand.
My mother worried the warts would be catching.
But she bent closer to the blue wool.
Beware eight and one, the old mouth repeated.
It was too late: Years before, her brother
had been shot on the 18th,
and she had just married on the 18th
a man born on the 18th.
She paid her dime and left.
She kept touching her head as if she would feel
blue wool there, touching her hand as if warts
had begun. She whispered the numbers
like names for death.
For years, nothing. Then, in ’81,
her mother died. Months later, her husband.
Eighteen years after that, her mind so far gone
that eight and one are nothing,
she grabs for my hand, stares far away
while I pray this mumbled fortune isn’t mine.
Poverty
What’s poverty, my father asked,
but something that the mind can turn
to gold? We were talking of vows
a saint might take—poverty, obedience.
He poured more whiskey in his glass,
tapped his cigarette till ash fell
on the floor. No matter—it was just dirt
packed down and hidden by old shingles
stones had worked their way through—
a case in point, my father said,
for tenacity, persistence. He liked
the Latin-sounding words. He read
the dictionary on the nights he lay off
booze, smoking his Chesterfields
in the light of the only lamp beside
the oilstove, our only heat. We’d spent
eight years in the unfinished house,
all of us still trying to believe nothing
was permanent. Change is an essential
condition of life, or at least of all life
subjected to extremes of temperature,
my father liked to say, a kind of prayer
that might exonerate him. My mother
took this as a cue to change position
by the stove where she stood reading,
keeping warm: That’s us, all right.
Extremes of temperature, and worse.
She’d stare at the bottle of Imperial
on the drawing board where blueprints
for the finished house were layered over
with more what-if schemes on napkins
from Santoro’s Bar, where bright ideas
often seized him. How could she bear it?
One year was another. I had three more
before I could escape to university. When sleep
eluded me, I lay dreaming of a life with walls
and carpets, heat. It came, soon enough,
but nothing seemed that different.
I looked the same, said things the way
I’d said them, often in my father’s voice,
ornate and Latinate locutions I was learning
to undo. Meanwhile, they sold the house,
still unfinished, and moved to Newburgh,
a comfortable apartment where my mother
sat calm among appliances and plumbing,
pretending none of it had happened.
But I wouldn’t say she turned it all
to gold, exactly. Gold’s redeemable.
Wildflowers
She dislikes the new calendar
with its watercolors of common
wildflowers, faded but precise, as if torn
from an old botany book. She rubs
bony fingers over the numbers, sighs.
Will I live another year? What about
the next century? Oh, why can’t I
walk! she cries suddenly, as if legs
are all she needs, and looks over
to the framed blurred newsprint picture
of herself as a girl, second-fastest runner
in Philadelphia. She should have won.
But the winner had trained all summer
with her father, a track coach at Temple.
I’ve heard this story too often to remember
the first time its point came home to me.
I’d lost a contest my life depended on.
Later it would be a man, another man,
another contest. Her story wasn’t
parable, just one about a track meet,
how the night before it, she knew she’d win;
losing was unthinkable—after all, she ran
like the wind. Here she’d pause and stare.
But there are things . . . Girls whose fathers
coached them, ribbons red as spilled blood . . .
Always she would stop then, shaking
off her disappointment, to keep me
from saying things too bitter in my own.
Or that’s how I remember it now when
she complains the wildflowers are too pale,
and besides, she can’t read the numbers
unless she’s close up. She doesn’t want
to be close up. She doesn’t want to know
what month. She just wants to keep running
the way she used to, a girl who believes
she can do it, she can beat the unthinkable.
Night in the Shape of a Mirror
God, I prayed. Help us.
My mother held the door
men were about to burst through.
They wore black coats,
like crows! hems dragging!
Her mouth worked the air
like a trapped animal.
Again I said it was nothing,
it was the night,
when you looked into the night
you saw your fears,
it was like looking into a mirror.
My mother stared. Both of us
wondering
who the other was—