Lynne Knight
 
AGAINST ORDER
 
Tear the line into pieces.
                                        Open it out:
          Let silence be
                              part of all that must be
                                                                      said.
I can't.                                         I can't.
It looks so disorganized. I want
to move it like furniture
back into place.
 
It's a curse, your obsession for order,
my lover says, wanting me
                                                  wild--
 
So, to justify myself, I point out
that light in the night sky
may be traveling, but the stars stay
where they are.
 
Or do they?
What if some night Cassiopeia
fell apart,
splashed down like water?
 
What use the well-appointed bed,
the vacuumed rug,
the alphabetically arranged books
if a star came splashing down
like water, fiery water,
burning everything in its path?
 
All my molecules about to scatter--
 
just the thought of it makes me clutch
the sheets, press myself into the mattress--
 
but ah, the wonder of it, to be
     moving inside my lover's
arms then, any second bound
                                                  to explode--



 
APPROACHING STORM
--after Wolf Kahn's The Quarters at Grass Creek
 
The thing is the quiet, the stillness.
          The hot wind, the heavy, tossed shade
of pecan trees. The building beaten
          by wind and sun, by yearlong rain--
toolsheds, they seem, too small even
          for animals. And yet humans lived here,
wore the boarded-off dirt to a patina,
          their gleaming, too, with heat,
with labor. And the nights they sat
          singing, their voices low, steady
with patience, nights the white man
          did not come to trouble them--
those are somewhere in the calm.
          So, too, the dark arms of a woman
reaching to tear a small branch
          from the pecan tree, carry it inside,
where its blossoms and light hold
          through dreams, into morning.
And the shame that will be written
          nowhere visible in the peaceful rush
of shadows across the high grass--
          the clouds that are just clouds, the rain
that will be rain not absolution.