USA

lynneknight@yahoo.com

Her Story

Who ends up telling it
matters as much as what's told:
Imagine Leda controlling her trembling

as the swan thrust deeper,
losing all sense of time
until she picked at a feather stuck to her thigh,

whispering It was more
like death than life. Dissolve to real
time, annihilated by the white sun, the white

man coming into the hut
while the woman lay in shadow, knowing
her screams would only mix in with the cicadas,

the crows, the words he would
deny like the coldness he could feel
trembling through her though she lay still, lay

still enough for death. I
have my own version, woke to it
one morning years ago, someone's hands

at my throat, my voice
through the cloth of the pillowcase
already hollow with what I was about to lose,

had already lost because
sleep had become a place violence
could invade with the dream's ease, the dream's

silence. I tried to tell
the story until it became someone
else's, until the hands at my throat

dissolved, dream image
offering no clear portent,
like the feather from the pillow

stuck to my brow afterwards
when I looked into the mirror and saw
another woman trembling to seize control.

First appeared in POETRY

Not Even They Could Stop It, and They Were Myth

There aren't enough stories to tell
of the moment he turned back.
Some say it made no difference,
the darkness had sunk so deep
in her veins she wouldn't have gone
one step more, already the light
seeped through her skin like a bruise.
Some say she'd long been deafened
by smoke and flame, so his song
meant nothing but fingers on the lyre,
and her skin hurt, even that quick touch
was beyond her desire. Others say
she had no desire, she'd eaten
darkness like a lover, it spilled
from her mouth, seeding.
Or she called out to him, knowing
he would turn, it would be over,
because she was tired of being
the one to follow, she had no lyre
or flute, true, but why
should her plain song go unheeded?
Or it was none of these, just their dread
of what had already happened.
He could make trees walk
from their roots, stones spin
in the earth, but he could not stop
the dark god's brooding reach
to ravage her unseen.
So the world filled with lament.
Sometimes as bearable music.
Sometimes not.
Even the animals learned it,
or waited deep in their fur
for its echo: that No-o-o-o-o
so endless it makes its own sphere,
travels through space like a star in reverse,
the streak of light like the last glimpse
he had of her hand, or she of his,
drawn back as if in emphasis
of the nothing that would last.

First appeared in POETRY

Hairpins

Whatever you do, don't include hairpins,
an ancient Chinese poet, loosely translated,
advised. Moons will do, or a lone frog in a pond,
but hairpins introduce the mundane
in its least appealing aspect, worse than
a woman who's let herself go or neglected to do
her hair, just tossed the pins and combs
and lacquers aside like a bead curtain
no longer needed to hide the rest
of the room or lure someone into it.

Today, cleaning the downstairs bathroom,
something else the wise would no doubt
leave out of poetry, I spilled an old
cold cream jar filled with hairpins
I hadn't known were there, and I saw
her stride out, her hair streaming
behind her like a Fury's, her mouth composed
against you, so magnificent with wrath
you felt you were watching Blake
etch one of his terrible angels.

The truth excites less: she left without fury,
she left behind things other than hairpins
that you've kept undisturbed: perfume, a scarf,
some books. I'd prefer the fury,
leaving as it does less room for love
to continue. But giving hairpins such weight
denies them their rightful place
in poetry, where they should be allowed
to lie hidden in jars, to lie scattered
on floors, to lay claim to the heart.

First appeared in Poetry Northwest

Lost Sestina
Leonardo's portrait of Ginevra de' Benci was painted c. 1478-80. Only one line of poetry written by Ginevra has survived, the opening of a sestina, which reads:
"I ask your forgiveness and I am a mountain tiger." --Mary D. Garrard


I ask your forgiveness and I am a mountain tiger,
waiting. Deny me, and my fur bleeds white
while I roam stone peaks that seem from here
(you lift your head to gaze) not of this world--
ideas some hand contrived from tempera or oils.
Deny me, and my white paws turn all nail.

But you would not have me suffer, not drive the nail
of your withholding through my heart. My tiger,
you've called me, rubbing your face against the oils
you've rubbed into my breasts and thighs, so white
they seem like snow, if snow could burn. The world
was no more than our chamber. Yes, here--

but then our tongues took over, we could not hear
above the blood roar I could feel down to the nail
as I held myself above you, the known world
blurring as trees and shadows must when tigers
rush all tooth and sinew for the kill. O white
annihilation, and afterward the aromatic oils

glistening on us both, heat and sweat and oils
mixed. Sweet lord, is memory to be my enemy? Here
is my heart, you told me, and held out your hand: white
but for the short dark hairs and yellowing nails.
I asked your forgiveness. Then I waited: as a tiger
stands in the still of the forest I stood in the world

of our chamber thinking how little anyone's world
amounted to--small heap of bones. Leonardo's oils
would outlast us. How you raged I was his prey, tiger
that would fall into his arms if he desired! Here,
where I have played the soft wood to your nail,
indulged your wildest fancy, lain still and white

while you tongued me from my ankles to my eyes, white
with my ecstasy--raged that I'd betrayed you and your world.
Then that baleful glare--each eye sharpened like a nail
by your suspicions.... But my fur sinks thick, the oils
in my body warm me. I'll outwait, outwit you, here
or anywhere--make you rue the day you whispered Tiger,

wanting me wilder. No, these oils will crack before your tiger
comes to you white and panting as she once did. I'll wait here,
tending my nails while you hunt in other women, cold as oils.


First appeared in Southern Humanities Review

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