An Instructor’s Dream

By Bill Knott, 1940 - 2014


Many decades after graduation
the students sneak back onto
the school-grounds at night
and within the pane-lit windows
catch me their teacher at the desk
or blackboard cradling a chalk:
someone has erased their youth,
and as they crouch closer to see
more it grows darker and quieter
than they have known in their lives,
the lesson never learned surrounds
them: why have they come? Is
there any more to memorize now
at the end than there was then—
What is it they peer at through shades
of time to hear, X times X repeated,
my vain efforts to corner a room’s
snickers? Do they mock me? Forever?
Out there my past has risen in
the eyes of all my former pupils but
I wonder if behind them others
younger and younger stretch away
to a day whose dawn will never
ring its end, its commencement bell.

Death

BY BILL KNOTT

Going to sleep, I cross my hands on my chest. 

They will place my hands like this. 

It will look as though I am flying into myself.

The Real Thing

By John Freeman


You’re perfectly fine now – well, like me, still
recovering from our strenuous week,
but fine compared with how you seemed to be
yesterday morning when I heard you call
help me, please, and I thought maybe a spider
needed removing, or something was stuck,
or would take two people to shift. From your voice
I couldn’t tell it was anything more,
and that you spoke undemonstratively
because you were on the point of passing out.
Which you did, eventually, after sighing,
groaning oh dear and looking strangely white,
by which time I was sitting next to you.
When you fainted finally I missed it,
hoping you were gathering your forces,
wondering whether you might be dying,
wishing I’d never not been nice to you.
Later the doctor, who was reassuring,
you told me, said it had been a true faint
and I wondered what a false faint might be,
but it was satisfying somehow to have
the authenticity of yours confirmed.
You said that when you opened your eyes at last
you were grateful to find me there with you,
which was, as I said then, and say again,
a feeling very much reciprocated.

Saudade

John Freeman

means nostalgia, I’m told, but also

nostalgia for what never was. Isn’t it

the same thing? At a café

in Rio flies wreathe my glass.

 

How you would have loved this: the waiter

sweating his knit shirt dark. Children

loping, in tiny suits or long shorts, dragging

toys and towels to the beach. We talk,

 

or I talk, and imagine your answer, the heat clouding our view.

Here, again, grief fashioned in its cruelest translation:

my imagined you is all I have left of you.

Chanukah II

Pachim Ketanim
By Yossi Huttler

after all the holy wars

you’ve fought

all the wounds and scars

and defilement

search yourself

for that one incorruptible

jug of oil

retrieve it

kindle it

and find yourself

illuminating

a miraculously long time

For Chanukah

Subway
By Billy Collins
As you fly swift underground
with a song in your ears
or lost in the maze of a book

Remember the ones who descended here
into the mire of bedrock
to bore a hole through the granite

to clear a passage for you
where there was only darkness
Remeber as you come up into the light

SOME TREES

--John Ashbery

These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbor, as though speech
Were a still performance. 
Arranging by chance

To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try

To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.

And glad not to have invented
Such comeliness, we are surrounded:
A silence already filled with noises,
A canvas on which emerges

A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.