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Bed and Bone

I can't wait to sleep in my own bed
I kept saying, sometimes to no one,
sometimes as provocation

to be left alone, so by the time
I came home and unpacked, I half
expected the bed to rise in greeting

like a lover, but it just lay there, dumb,
flat, I saw it wouldn't take off
so much as a sock if it were a man,

I would have to do everything,
but I went to it anyway, smiling,
beyond shame, I lay down and sighed

to my bed, that shifted a little as if afraid
I might weep, as I sometimes did,
but not now, now I was about to sleep

in my bed when suddenly I saw
how it would look like other beds
stripped of its covers, as I would look

without my hair and flesh
and it was then, dear friend,
that grief took hold and shook me

back to that summer in Ithaca,
when, tired of Ulysses, we'd walk
from the dorm to stand below the waterfall,

dazed by how quick all passage is.
Bed to bone to nothing.
Mine, then gone.

First printed in Poetry Northwest

 
None of Us at Prayer

The first morning the dogwood flowered, we slowed down
to watch the petals guttering above the ravine floor. The branches
were candelabra, this had been said many times before, the woods
a cathedral, that too, but we were young, innocent of names
already given. We knew picking dogwood was forbidden,
so we dreamed of sneaking out while others slept to break
whatever branches we could reach and run with them like torches
through the tunnel of oak and maple that by day was just the street
we lived on. We would whirl and spin the white-tipped branches
until the flames thinned, then wait while our senses calmed, the petals
reignited. The first one I touched shocked me with its thickness,
its wet. The four bracts swirled pink at their centers were the wounds
of Christ, the nuns had told us, and if we were pure in prayer, our palms
might open some day and bleed of their own accord as the dogwood bled
while we dreamed our way through the tunnel, lit by our stolen torches.

Years passed and still none of us had dared to pick one branch,
even one blossom, for fear we would be mutilating the persistent body
of Christ, though by now we were old enough to know the stigmata
came from hysteria, probably sexual hysteria, unholy fervor.
And we were old enough to sneer at descriptions of dogwood as
candelabra, at our dreams of weaving white torches through the night.
If we sneaked out for anything, it was apt to be boys, who waited like trees
in the dark and pulled us into them, wordlessly. So whoever it was
who broke the first one off, reached out one morning on the way
to school and slid the jagged sprig through the buttonhole
of her blazer lapel, saying So let them arrest me, none of us could say
with certainty now. Maybe none of it happened. Maybe none of us
lay dreaming of the flames of dogwood dipping and arcing while we made
our strange circling procession. But we are all marked by it. Look at
my palms, the emptiness. The cathedral in ruins, and none of us at prayer.

First printed in North American Review

Dissolving Borders

Long ago in China a poet dreamed of a river
made from notes the birds pour forth
He longed to drink from it
but each time he put out his hands
they turned into a boat let loose on water
or an old bridge laced with lanterns

The poet wept
His cries woke the villagers, though he still slept
What kind of cry is that, ruining
the night they asked
After a while they pressed their hands to their ears

In the morning the poet woke singing of love
as a river that will carry us to death
His song so displeased the emperor
he ordered the poet's exile

That evening the villagers gathered on the bridge
and watched the poet pole downriver
on a boat so small many swore
they were dreaming, though they could feel
the wind at their trousers, the wide planks
the dead had laid with their hands 

First printed in New England Review

© All Copyright, Lynne Knight.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.