Bill Knott

(homage Jacob van Hoddis ) The CIA and the KGB exchange Christmas cards A blade snaps in two during an autopsy The bouquet Bluebeard gave his first date reblooms Many protest the public stoning of a guitar pick Railroad trains drop off the bourgeois’ pointy head A martyr sticks a coffeecup out under a firehose Moviestars make hyenas lick their spaceship God’s hand descends into a glove held steady by the police At their reunion The New Faces recognize each other A spoiled child sleeps inside a thermometer A single misprint in a survival manual kills everyone The peace night makes according to the world comes

Octopus floating in earth’s ink-ore core whose arms extend up here as trees may your branches squirt their black across my pages please

The wooden horses are tired of their courses and plead from head to hoof to be fed to a stove— In leaping lunging flames they’d rise again, flared manes snapping like chains behind them. The smoke would not blind them as do these children’s hands: beyond our cruel commands the fire will free them then as once the artisan when out of the tree they were nagged to this neigh.

is thought to be a confession, won by endless torture, but which our interrogators must hate to record—all those old code names, dates, the standard narrative of sandpaper throats, even its remorse, fall ignored. Far away, a late (not lost) messenger stares, struck by window bargains or is it the gift of a sudden solicitude: is she going to lift up her shadow’s weight, shift hers onto it? She knows who bears whom. In that momentary museum where memory occurs more accrue of those torturers’ pincers than lessened fingernails, eyes teased to a pulp, we beg for closeups.Ormolus, objets d’art! A satyr drains an hourglass with one gulp.

Going to sleep, I cross my hands on my chest. They will place my hands like this. It will look as though I am flying into myself.

(to JK) Those scars rooted me. Stigmata stalagmite I sat at a drive-in and watched the stars Through a straw while the Coke in my lap went Waterier and waterier. For days on end or Nights no end I crawled on all fours or in My case no fours to worship you: Amoeba Behemoth. —Then you explained your DNA calls for Meaner genes than mine and since you are merely So to speak its external expression etcet Ergo among your lovers I’ll never be ... Ah that movie was so faraway the stars melting Made my thighs icy. I see: it’s not you Who is not requiting me, it’s something in you Over which you have no say says no to me.

(...after my Mother’s death) Here not long enough after the hospital happened I find her closet lying empty and stop my play And go in and crane up at three blackwire hangers Which quiver, airy, released. They appear to enjoy Their new distance, cognizance born of the absence Of anything else. The closet has been cleaned out Full-flush as surgeries where the hangers could be Amiable scalpels though they just as well would be Themselves, in basements, glovelessly scraping uteri But, here, pure, transfigured heavenward, they’re Birds, whose wingspans expand by excluding me. Their Range is enlarged by loss. They’d leave buzzards Measly as moths: and the hatshelf is even higher!— As the sky over a prairie, an undotted desert where Nothing can swoop sudden, crumple in secret. I’ve fled At ambush, tag, age: six, must I face this, can I have my hide-and-seek hole back now please, the Clothes, the thicket of shoes, where is it? Only The hangers are at home here. Come heir to this Rare element, fluent, their skeletal grace sings Of the ease with which they let go the dress, slip, Housecoat or blouse, so absolvingly. Free, they fly Trim, triangular, augurs leapt ahead from some geometric God who soars stripped (of flesh, it is said): catnip To a brat placated by model airplane kits kids My size lack motorskills for, I wind up glue-scabbed, Pawing goo-goo fingernails, glaze skins fun to peer in as Frost-i-glass doors ... But the closet has no windows, Opaque or sheer: I must shut my eyes, shrink within To peep into this wall. Soliciting sleep I’ll dream Mother spilled and cold, unpillowed, the operating- Table cracked to goad delivery: its stirrups slack, Its forceps closed: by it I’ll see mobs of obstetrical Personnel kneel proud, congratulatory, cooing And oohing and hold the dead infant up to the dead Woman’s face as if for approval, the prompted Beholding, tears, a zoomshot kiss. White-masked Doctors and nurses patting each other on the back, Which is how in the Old West a hangman, if He was good, could gauge the heft of his intended ... Awake, the hangers are sharper, knife-’n’-slice, I jump Helplessly to catch them to twist them clear, Mis-shape them whole, sail them across the small air Space of the closet. I shall find room enough here By excluding myself; by excluding myself, I’ll grow.