ROBERT KNOX - Ancient Letters

to pursue their

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890 sq. ft. of reality

Allen – 212 – Spahr-Summers

Robert Knox

Ancient Letters

You mean those epistles written in adolescent solitude, sick with desire and speechlessness? What could one say, having advanced only so far down the unilluminated tunnel of muddling discomfort, with no brighter model for discourse, no curriculum of civilized conduct, beyond that provided by the narrator of a famous war novel, earnestly seeking to make time with the attractive nurse?

“Love me,” I might have written, in the speechlessness of those dark hours, for surely things will fall out better for us than for the tragic object of my sole lovelorn literary model, even as oceans of Eros rose to drown me, leaving those long-ago scribbles dead on the page.

Knox - 213

Beauty, Use

Nobody’s gonna be good all the time Nobody’s gonna be right all the time But if you’re taking what you’ve been given and doing something of use or beauty with it that brought benefit to even one person –sleeping in the bed you made, eating your food, warming their chilly fingers in the muff, the tea cozy (eyeing the flower in the pot), you create from the materials at hand then surely you are fulfilling your purpose here on Earth

Beauty is useful –it is the highway to truth We exist to discover, embrace, contribute beauty Hence the Keatsian formula – beauty/truth, truth/beauty... That is all you need to know,

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and in times such as these, you need to know it.

cluster fuck

Knox – 215 – Spahr-Summers

Chair People

My father had his recliner Now that I am of an age and station that I always thought of as ‘his,’ I long for those solitary hours of ‘relaxing,’ a favorite word for the private occupations of his day, that made me wonder ‘from what?’

Now I consume the same such hours with a lasting avidity A book, a show, a game, an occasional off-duty pass from the runaway chariot that drags me to that penal chair where I pound stony minutes to dust

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All Those Homely Longings

Inhaling early October dark, that special blend: Evenings so rich you can drink the memory of an afternoon’s warmth. Remembering this hour all those other sacred hours, those sudden-early evening closures, premonitions perhaps, that everything we love must also, beautifully, as whisper-sweet and sad as twilight, give up the ghost to a pure and wordless darkness speaking only of the light from other worlds.

Drinking then of nature’s cocktail of concentrated memoires, distant addresses of the heart, remembering homes that linger in the love of rural spaces, neighborhoods of trees: a someplace in the woods, phoneless, off the grid, or planted among fields, squeezed into the end of furrows, dwellings of wood stoves and fireplaces, wells, outhouses, barn cats with adoption papers and litters on the way,

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row houses in fading mill towns, plywood cabins on the dirt road out of town, intimations then of that other town, deeper still, in the lands beyond the building code.

Memories of a home, that is, never found ‘in town,’ but in some transitory, alternative everyplace pitted with human complexities, ambiguous connections worrying up the daylight… And yet at day’s end still, unworldly hours: Pure and unaccountable, measureless moments here or there, fleeting, impossible to pull back later to interrogate, to remember, even, when the mind searches for them, as for a lifeline to deeper understandings.

Later, searching for them, Tugging in the dark for lost threads of an old story, listening for ancient songs,

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notes beyond the range of ordinary hearing, thoughts without words, feelings without names,

recovering only this: the sacred yearning silence of an autumn twilight, a timeless day’s-end dusky falling, a calling for a home among the trees.

red tree 2

Knox – 219 – Spahr-Summers