On this pavement I have fallen without grace, and I am looking into the eyes of a handsome blue stranger, who will not let me rise. He says an ambulance is coming. I may have broken a bone. But he is lying, and he knows that I can rise if I desire. This lady claims…
Welcome to our show How Funny Can You Get. Without saying or doing anything contestants must appear so clearly we can’t help laughing. Sit down, no jokes or lettuce tuxedos tolerated. Be yourself here. Don’t smile. When you think in an objective sense you are funny enough raise the right hand. If we laugh then,…
I was going round Manhattan . . . and I noticed a girl sitting all by herself on the other side of the deck – a girl of about thirty, wearing a shabby skirt. She was enjoying herself. A nice expression, with a wrinkled forehead, a good many wrinkles. I said to my friend, `I…
In April when she drove away he looked at his hands. They were oily from the boat’s engine, from the garage. But what a thing to notice. He turned and saw the children, who were watching from the steps, and wondered what she had given him now. The day before she left they discovered something…
I was middle-aged before I learned not even place is constant. Moths surrender flight each morning, like the huge ones we found dead against the screen. Madmen even cage the kling-kling bird. Places drift. Where had everything gone? Boulder, mountain, meadow, beach wore time’s integument like mist. Poinciana blurred. Palms, once a silhouette of summer,…
If you were to go there alone you would find whole branches rising by themselves from the floor . . . You would see leaves and pine needles leap off into the still air, and return. There are animals in that forest without voices. Songs drifting through, like fog. Slowly you would notice the trees…
I open the door to the last century and they are there, the only two men I ever loved, sitting at a table, playing cribbage, puffing on their pipes. I enter the room expecting them to rise, but they do not; one says he is preoccupied with nothing, the other does not speak at all….
Once words stunned the field, like sudden rain, as if Rain were the name of a woman, whose eyes drenched yours alive in the full torrent of saying exactly what she wanted to say. Then husbandry took over: the dry stare of a dry bush, piling one odd rock on top of another odd rock…
* I first read some poems of Bill Knott's in magazines nearly 10 years ago, in the Fall of 1967. I was a sophomore in college. I remember being stunned by the passion and mystery of the poems. At that time I'd only been reading contemporary poetry with any direction for a year or so…
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