Poetry

Best Buy Yes, I’ve watched them come and go. They’re not talking of Michaelangelo; just to someone on their cell phones — as they wander to and fro at Best Buy. They come in droves like a first night Broadway crowd, like lemmings gone down to the sea, like children after the Pied Piper. It’s […]

notebook poem #1 what is there to say the athlete grown old he is still the athlete no need for garlands need for purpose something beyond old photographs © John Knoepfle 2004

fall night stars in their dormitories they are like students even when they are awake they are asleep © John Knoepfle 2003, 2004

Barn Cat I wanted my old cat. My old cat curled around my neck Like a black velvet collar. She purred in my ear. She talked all the time, And when she was irritated She talked very loud. She rode my shoulders Upstairs and downstairs And even into the basement. This mouse-fattened barn cat Is […]

Down on the farmThere’s corn and beans and men in jeans that ride up on big green machines down dusty roads where hoppy toads get outta the way of oversized loads of yellow hay. There’s cats and dogs and morning fogs and beat-up trucks carrying smelly hogs on in to town where they’ll be ground […]

sandalwood poem #20   it was the marriage day some forty-seven years now and out beyond my window an amazement of christmas snow cottonwood tree sudden with frost I remember when we left the church our morning hesitant with snowflakes and some of them caught in her hair the dark innocence of her hair © […]

sandalwood poem #19 ravens in the blue ridge the james running east for tidewater I thought west then a man backtracking his wonder charlestown below the hawks nest the kanawha softened in a gauze of mist and the valley that broad ohio of my dreaming you were there even before I came my campfire in […]

sandalwood poem #18 I am drained like a shadow like sunlight dancing on a sacred river cracked bones and dust the earth floods now and is sweetened old sprinkler man comes home returned from some thought brooding cavern released from some bandit hour a fall of dew a fragrance of rosemary mysterious flowers scattered on […]

sandalwood poem #17 I circle this table I do not come back to the place where I began though I want to say that I do perhaps you are the one who is constant really a red warning light that never changes I want to go a long way where I will find myself not […]

sandalwood poem #l6   always in your loving there is so much sorrow there is the wind uncertain in the crowns of summer maple there is the everlasting conciliation of the tides © John Knoepfle 1978, 2004

sandalwood poem #15 it is an indirect suggestion the burgundy sun slipping under this level prairie and all this earth old valleys pensive tides of its women motions of wounds nations enduring servants of the grain this one only planet swung out in space whirling in clouds this soft and blue lovely light our luminous […]

sandalwood poem #14 where we have gone into our hidden selves we do not need to find each other at home in that country or bother to know what we know those beloved things familiar images places of concord the lights that burn there burn without flickering © John Knoepfle 1978, 2004