Again
by Lynne Knight

What is instantly remarkable in Again is the exquisite clarity of its imagery and its profound, fervent tone. And what I love about Lynne Knight’s poems is that they feel and sound exactly true. Hers is a voice one immediately trusts. It is sensuous, attentive, intelligent, and ruthlessly honest as she interrogates the tangled relationship between what is said or kept secret, loved or feared, lit or kept in shadows—a chiaroscuro that her poems relentlessly explore. “Suddenly, knowledge comes, unstoppable as water” says Knight, and in response I’ll quote another one of her wonderful lines: “How beautiful it is . . . and will be when you look again.”

—Laure-Anne Bosselaar

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LYNNE KNIGHT'S previous collections are Dissolving Borders (Quarterly Review of  Literature), The Book of Common Betrayal (Bear Star Press), and Night in the Shape of a Mirror (David Robert Books), plus three award-winning chapbooks. Her cycle of poems on Impressionist winter paintings, Snow Effects (Small Poetry Press), has been translated into French by Nicole Courtet. Knight’s work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2000, and her awards include a Theodore Roethke Award from Poetry Northwest, a Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and an NEA grant. She lives in Berkeley.

 

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POEMS FROM Again

Prologue

                        

While we slept, such heavy rain swept past

it shook the last roses loose. They lay

smashed on the deck this morning, their petals

scattered like big white tears. I shouldn’t say

a thing so sentimental. But there they were.

And you, my father, so long dead, why

should I not expect you to be everywhere,

reminding me how little will be left—

vague ache in my own daughter’s heart

as she sweeps the steps after rain whose mercy

is all in the coming, the coming again.

The Gold Basket

                           after Sébastien Stoskopff’s Corbeille de verres

She filled a gold-mesh basket with crystal glasses.

Gently, so none would break.

 

And none did, until the last one, the one she knew

might be the one-too-many. The shattering

 

was quick, isolate, less dramatic than her fear

of everything going to pieces. And so what:

 

It was only a painting. She’d seen it in a museum,

bought a postcard. Still, every night

 

she lay filling the gold basket with glasses, worried

she was going too far,

 

and going too far. In this way she became familiar

with grief, which finally requires of us

 

acceptance but also tact

in the doing: breakage, yes, but not utter ruin.