USA

lynneknight@yahoo.com

First Year of My Mother's Dementia

I opened the door and flicked on the lights
just as the deer seemed about to leap back
into the dark. Startled, he stood by the clay urn

he'd just overturned, dirt and shards heaped
near his strict feet. His right leg lifted slightly,
as if in amends. I smiled. His eyes blinked

so slowly he seemed tired, and I wanted
to invite him inside. I saw him sitting on
the leather sofa, legs crossed, leaning close

to listen, like someone having trouble with
the language. I talked slowly, wanting him
to understand, not be something other.

Then he leaped the dark as if he'd never been.
I swept up the dirt and shards, chiding myself
for thinking I could change the nature of things.


--Published in Southern Review, Summer 2001

When I Open My Mother

I meant to write "When I open my mouth"
but instead it came out
When I open my mother
and now I can feel my breath move

to the side, like a body,
or like eyes deciding not to see.
I force myself to look out into the green
of oak and oleander. To keep from seeing death

I stare into the shade beyond.
Shade: another word for the departed.
When I open my shade ...
When my mother dies, I'll keep the shades

pulled for days. I won't want to open
the door. I'll wail, and carry on,
and emptiness will open all around me
till everything seems air,

just as it did the first time I opened
my mother.
But how much harder now
to breathe without her.


--Published in Southern Review, Summer 2001

The Language of Love

What country is this? The woman stands
above a censer, smoke of ambergris
floating up under her wide pagoda hat.
Everything except her mouth and skin,

the ornate rug she stands on
and her loose sleeves' deep red rims
glows white, threatened by the censer's
smoke. But wait the pagoda hat is more

a veil, close up, coarsely woven
she's not Japanese but Moroccan,
with an elaborated silver cross
hung round her neck. An exotic,

letting the heavy scent of ambergris
slow her blood until the day's a dream
the way the painting of it is, and neither
part of time the way we measure it.

I want to say it's like the time
we take when we make love,
letting the body go where it will,
slow then quick then slow again

like smoke climbing the stone portico
whose shade the woman stands in.
But it's more like wanting to make love
watching you across the room

in late afternoon shadows, thinking
I can take in the scent of your warm skin
again, again, I can come to you
as anyone, depending on my tongue.

after John Singer Sargent's Fumée d'ambre gris

--Published in convovulus, Number 52

Meal

I had eaten the holiness from things,
chewed the bones of grace,
torn the soft beaks of forgiveness.

Otherwise the days seemed ordinary.
I drove where I had to drive.
I gave the old dog milk and grain,

waited for night to ease my skin.
Because the light hurt so.
Even when I kept to the shadows

it glared on what I had done.
Over so little, almost nothing, a small hurt
I had allowed to enter

when I knew he had meant me no harm.
I tried to think what I would need
to say to him, what psalm

would give him back the long lines
of my love. And I was afraid,
because I had eaten the holiness from things.


--Published in North Dakota Quarterly,
Winter 2001

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