Alexander VI kept hemp fires burning
to remind himself that everything is ephemeral
like rising smoke. Why invoke the past
to darken the future, he asked, stirring
the ashes into burning coals before adding
more hemp to the fire. January, cold,
another year when either one of us might go
the way of smoke, will go, when
it happens, since we both want cremation.
Gloomy thoughts, gloomy life, my mother said,
though willed cheer got her nowhere
far beyond desperation. Things must cohere,
I used to think as a child, convinced the chaos
around me would resolve into clarity
if only I could find the right gear or lever
for the strange machinery called life.
No genius was ever easy to live with, my father
would say defensively, as if that alone might justify—
Not my father again. Let me speak as someone
else, I’m so tired of my own life story.
Not that it matters, given how hard it is to know
anything about anything, let alone the truth
about ourselves. I’ve never seen smoke rise
from a hemp fire and have no idea what years
Alexander VI reigned. I just happened to read
an essay against self-importance where
this habit of his was invoked. I’ll look him up
later. Right now it seems important to say
the idea of losing you is unbearable. Speaking
as myself again. Eyes wet, as if from smoke.
LYNNE KNIGHT’s fourth collection, Again, was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2009. Her previous collections are Dissolving Borders (Quarterly Review of Literature), The Book of Common Betrayals (Bear Star Press), and Night in the Shape of a Mirror (Word Tech), plus three award-winning chapbooks. A cycle of poems on Impressionist winter paintings, Snow Effects (Small Poetry Press), was translated into French by Nicole Courtet. Knight’s awards include a Theodore Roethke Award from Poetry Northwest, a Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, an NEA grant, and the 2009 RATTLE Poetry Prize. The bilingual I Know (Je sais), translated by Knight and its author Ito Naga, will appear from Sixteen Rivers Press in September 2013. She lives in Berkeley, California.
