Pallid and swollen, the moon lifts itself out of our fallow field where we stand alone together one last time.
2. Our First Meteor Shower
You made a point of telling me that shooting stars were not whole stars but shards of light discarded by the night.
3. Astrology vs. Astronomy
We constructed a life together the way ancient astronomers constructed constellations out of myths and legends and imaginary lines connecting one emptiness to another.
4. Night Lessons
In the sky tonight, long dead stars teach us Heaven begins with loss.
5. Nocturnal
The darkness cannot cast a shadow without moonlight, while the night only needs the feathers of an owl.
6. Winter Farewell
When we finally say goodbye, the moon hangs spider-like for a moment in the silver threads of our breath.
7. Waking to a Morning Moon
The night has come undone. I find its lost, bright button rolling across the dawn sky.
*
Kip Knott is a writer, teacher, photographer, and part-time art dealer living in Delaware, Ohio. His most recent full-length collection of poetry, The Other Side of Who I Am, is available from Kelsay Books. A new poetry chapbook, The Misanthrope in Moonlight, is available from Bottlecap Press. You can follow him on Instagram at @kip.knott and read more of his work at www.kipknott.com.
Someday, when someone tells me out of the blue that they love me,
somehow I’ll stop myself from turning and walking away the way I sometimes do
when love threatens to blow apart my heart with something too much for me to hold inside,
something like—but not exactly like—fullness, something like an emptiness of emptiness,
something that I know we all deserve, but something that far too many of us fear,
something that somebody somewhere once told me was happiness.
*
When I Play Leonard Cohen the First Time for a Friend
Yeah, my friends are gone and my hair is gray I ache in the places where I used to play . . . . — Leonard Cohen, “The Tower of Song”
She winces and grits her teeth. “Who is that? His voice creeps me out!” she says, shaking her head as if trying to cast out a nightmare.
She isn’t wrong. But she isn’t right, either. Where she feels the unpleasantness that creepy can cause, I feel the unease of someone
approaching the end of his life at the speed of death; the unease of someone whose body has taken over rather than be overtaken by its owner;
the unease reverberating like a cry behind every note sung with a voice raw with knowing, raspy with regret, yet somehow resolved to keep on singing
until every breath is gone and all that remains is the long, slow, lingering fade out.
*
Kip Knott’s most recently full-length book of poetry, The Other Side of Who I Am, is available from Kelsay Books. A new poetry chapbook, Little Hiroshimas, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2024. You can follow him on IG at @kip.knott and read more of his work at http://www.kipknott.com.
How many growth years can be counted in the light and dark concentric rings that mark our life together? Thicker rings prove that we flourished for a time—mostly early— while thinner rings show the wear and tear seasons of drought wrought upon the two of us. It’s those later years where the wedge slips in, splitting us all the way down to our roots.
What’s left of us, splintered kindling and logs already weathered by years of neglect, will burn hot, but will also burn too briefly, sending our smoke high into the air entwined until the wind dissipates us into the atmosphere, separate parts of one inescapable whole.
*
Early Onset Ghost Town
The ghost town where I have lived my life is a cage full of air. All the birds flew away in search of other trees or other skies beyond this sky. There’s nothing left but weathered ribs and hollowness.
For years I have been a cage full of all the birds that flew away. But now feathered memories have broken through my chest, and soon there will be nothing left but weathered ribs and hollowness. There’s no stopping them. I watch as they take flight one by one,
feathered memories flapping out of my chest in search of other trees or other skies beyond my sky. There’s no stopping them. I watch as they take flight one by one, leaving only the ghost town of my body. I have lived my life.
*
Kip Knott is a writer, photographer, teacher, and part-time art dealer living in Delaware, Ohio. His third book of poetry, The Other Side of Who I Am, is due later this year from Kelsay Books. His debut collection of stories, Some Birds Nest in Broken Branches (Alien Buddha Press), is available on Amazon. You can follow him on Instagram at @kip.knott and read more of his work at kipknott.com.
At ten years old I prayed every night before I closed my eyes
that I would live a long life. By twelve I had come to know death
was not the empty robin’s nest just outside my bedroom window,
but the desiccated hatchling lying on the ground below
curled into itself forever.
*
Kip Knott is a writer, photographer, teacher, and part-time art dealer living in Delaware, Ohio. His third book of poetry, The Other Side of Who I Am, is due later this year from Kelsay Books. His debut collection of stories, Some Birds Nest in Broken Branches (Alien Buddha Press), is available on Amazon. You can follow him on Instagram at @kip.knott and read more of his work at kipknott.com.
“Death. It’s inevitable. There’s a hole you come out of and there’s a hole you’re gonna go in. . . . Being dead is a liberating experience.” — from an interview in 2021 with Gary Betzner, who faked his own death in 1977
Who knows what compels a man to jump off the edge of a bridge in the middle of nowhere Arkansas, wife and kids in the car, engine running, churning river currents below whispering, The water will save you. Come on in.
Drugs? Smuggling? Underworld kingpin? Spy? The mind loves the unknown, the mysterious, the impossible equation, the riddle left unsolved; podcast fodder that draws the casual listener in with what ifs, whodunits, and new clues.
If the world we live in today has shown us anything, it has shown that we secretly crave catastrophe when we watch the evening news, that we pray for the hurricane to exceed expectations and destroy everything—someone else’s everything.
After years of conjecture, the truth about the man on the bridge reveals itself to be nothing more than a hoax, an escape we secretly hoped would keep our antihero free from 20-to-life behind bars. We breathe a sigh of relief and let out an inaudible cheer.
But the real truth is this: we all hide secrets deep beneath flesh, muscle, and bone; secrets that eventually become too heavy to carry; secrets that are just heavy enough to pull us under roiling river water to a grave of silt and mud
where clouds of catfish wait to pick our bloated bodies clean.
*
Photophobia
May 24, 2022
I used to believe in the spirit animals and gods that I found in constellations of stars. But when I look at the sky tonight,
I see only bullet holes piercing the dark, one for every child we’ve lost, two for all the children we will keep losing
until constellations bleed together and the night sky becomes something other than night, something
horribly empty and horribly full.
*
Post-it Notes to a Young Poet
based on Post-it Note drawings by Aron Wiesenfeld
1. Post-it Note Drawing #28
Learn to wait. Rain won’t. The bus isn’t a sure thing. You are the rain. And the rain is.
2. Post-it Note Drawing #29
Be content to carry the burden of all the words you plan to write throughout your life.
3. Post-it Note Drawing #26
Feel free to worship anything. Prayers are nothing more than poems waiting to be written.
4. Post-it Note Drawing #25
Never forget: Shadows have the power to cut through more than light.
5. Post-it Note Drawing #38
A poem exists in that moment after you’ve climbed atop the slide and before you take the plunge.
6. Post-it Note Drawing #20
Learn to accept those moments when your words become someone else’s burden to carry.
7. Post-it Note Drawing #37
And learn to accept other moments when poems slip formless as smoke from your lips when you speak.
8. Post-it Note Drawing #40
Always remember that smoke carries some part of you away as it rises up. Be truthful in everything you say.
9. Post-it Note Drawing #22
If ever you lose the will to write, burn all these notes and harvest new words from the ashes.
*
Kip Knott’s debut collection of stories, Some Birds Nest in Broken Branches, was released earlier this year from Alien Buddha Press. His newest book of poetry, Clean Coal Burn, is available from Kelsay Books. He spends most of his spare time traveling throughout Appalachia and the Midwest taking photographs and searching for lost art treasures. You can follow him on Twitter at @kip_knott and read more of his work at kipknott.com.
“There is a lot of darkness that people are confronting right now . . . . All people are like prisms, with internal characteristics, through which the world is filtered.” —Aron Wiesenfeld
1.
When I was a child I sailed toy ships in the drainage ditch beneath the looming overpass that ran behind our house.
Tires speeding through puddles overhead channeled crashing waves that I imagined smashed against the hull tied to the end of my line.
Breaching eighteen-wheeled leviathans shook the world around me, rippling rings of greasy rainbows from one shore to the next.
Above everything, I heard my parents shouting, not for me to come in, but at each other, the way thunder yells at lightning for flashing too bright.
To this day I still don’t know if I was the one guiding the ship, or if an otherworldly stowaway had thrown a line to me
and I was waiting for someone to pull me in, to pull me under.
2.
It’s easy enough to step that one step forward and fall endlessly away from the troubles that trouble the world around me, around you, around us all.
To take that one step away from the edge and fall back into all the divisions and ills that plague this world, that step is the hardest step of all.
Whichever way I choose to move I know that I will fall upon a high wire stretched between the precipice of a world I will come to know all in all
and the precipice of a world that every day seems ready to fall.
3.
The sight of my reflection waving from the cell of a mirrored windowpane stops me in my tracks as I walk alone to work.
I wave back. My reflection motions for me to join him. Over both our heads, dark clouds shift and churn in opposite directions.
Before I take another step, I must decide if the blood that broken glass will draw from shredded flesh is worth the chance to learn
who lives on the other side of who I am.
4.
We occupy a liminal space. One of us stands, the other sits. We exist
together, apart,
not quite shadows, not quite reflections.
Reflections exist as both the same and other,
reversed, opposite.
One of us stands, the other sits. We exist in an endless liminal space.
5.
I have sometimes posed myself in a final repose just to know the shape of death.
And now, after years of loneliness, I am too weak to lift my head to see
if any pose I ever struck actually matched the contours of my body as I slowly
drift away.
*
Kip Knott’s first collection of short stories, Some Birds Nest in Broken Branches, is available from Alien Buddha Press. His most recent full-length book of poetry, Clean Coal Burn, is available from Kelsay Books. You can follow him on Twitter at @kip_knott and read more of his writing at kipknott.com.
*
I would like to offer my thanks to Aron Wiesenfeld for creating the powerful and evocative artwork that inspired this poem. The following five paintings were particularly inspirational:
My paintings—not my life—flash before my eyes.
For decades I tried to paint the heartbeat of the universe,
filling a thousand empty canvases with something more than stars
and darkness, more than the atoms that no longer bind me
to this world. I watch the five moons of my children orbit overhead
as I drift away. They weep for me as they wept for their father
when he departed this world more than fifteen years before,
never knowing the truth that he took with him, the truth I still carry
in my failing heart, the truth that art was the real center of my universe.
And now in death I must accept a truth just as harsh,
that the sound of the universe is nothing more than a chronic static hiss,
not a heartbeat at all, but a dying breath exhaled and unending.
*
Kip Knott’s most recent book of poetry, Clean Coal Burn, is available from Kelsay Books. His first collection of short stories, Some Birds Nest in Broken Branches, is forthcoming in 2022 from Alien Buddha Press. You can follow him on Twitter at @kip_knott and read more of his writing at kipknott.com. Currently, he lives in Delaware, Ohio, with his wife and son.
As a teacher and a part-time art dealer, I am an avid patron of art museums who typically visits museums throughout the Midwest and Appalachia several times a year. Due to the stay-at-home mandates in Ohio during 2020, however, I was limited to either conducting my museum visits virtually or thumbing through my own collection of art books to satisfy my cravings. I found myself returning again and again to The Helga Pictures by Andrew Wyeth. The story of Wyeth’s and Helga Testorf’s self-imposed isolation from the prying eyes of the public for nearly 15 years so that he could produce more than 240 portraits of her really struck a chord with me. The poems that make up the Andrew and Helga sequence were all written during that stay-at-home period and reflect the sense of isolation that many people felt at the height of the pandemic. In a very real sense, these poems could not have been written in the same way under “normal” writing conditions.
When Mark Danowsky accepted the sequence “Andrew and Helga, Lost and Found” for ONE ART, he challenged me to write a series of poems based on the paintings of Jamie Wyeth, Andrew’s son. I accepted the challenge and immediately began an in-depth exploration of Jamie’s paintings. I found myself particularly drawn to his many excellent portraits of people and animals, portraits that did more than merely replicate the appearance of his subjects. Just as his father’s portraits of Helga reveal a startling intimacy between the artist and his subject, Jamie’s portraits convey a similar intimacy that pulls the viewer into the worlds and emotions of his subjects, be they pigs or people. In just two months, I had written three poetry sequences based on eight of Jamie’s paintings. When read together, the poems based on Andrew’s paintings and the poems based on Jamie’s paintings coalesce into conversation between a father and his son about intimacy, love, family, and—above all else—art.
*
Andrew and Helga, Lost and Found
I’m a secretive bastard. I would never let anybody watch me painting. It would be like somebody watching you have sex—painting is that personal to me.
— Andrew Wyeth
I’m supposed to be the mystery woman, something lost and found.
— Helga Testorf
I. Black Velvet, 1972
I have completed God’s work, creating you as a constellation with the empty spaces between stars
filled in and fully realized. I have made you whole yet weightless, luminous in the perfect darkness
of the universe, God-like in your own right. Or, more truthfully, a Goddess reclining
on the backs of prayers that slip silently from the lips of supplicants. Every night, believers look up
to you for guidance before being pulled down into sleep, the only world where we exist
alone with nothing, or no one, to hold onto.
II. Sheepskin, 1973
There is something you’re not telling me, something I try to conjure out of you with a tempera potion
born out of rabbit-skin glue, distilled water, crushed marble, honey, egg yolks, and beeswax.
You don’t keep the secret in your eyes, as a layman would believe. Nor can it be found like the remnants
of a whispered prayer in the creases surrounding your enigmatic mouth.
A mouth that refuses to betray a smile or a frown. A mouth that once formed the word yes
when I asked if I could capture them—and you—in ink and paint. You keep your secret in your hands,
not as one might protect the delicate papier-mâché of a robin’s egg found abandoned beneath a hedgerow,
but as one cups a firefly, its tiny, otherworldly light just barely illuminating the narrow gaps
that never fully seal between closed fingers.
III. Easter Sunday, 1975
Runnels of stubborn snow shroud the muddy ground surrounding you and, by extension, me.
When I found you four Easters ago, I knew I had found the hollow place where the desire that I feared
had died was actually hiding, very much alive, thrumming like a hive: the desire to be divorced from all
expectations and preconceptions of the artist, the father, and the husband I had to be.
You gave me permission to paint for myself, to personify in you every secret I keep,
to finally release my soul from gray barnboard and brown barley grass and live in the world again
as flesh, blood, and bone. Now, on this Easter Sunday, in an otherwise barren landscape,
you are my one promise of green.
IV. Drawn Shade, 1977
I am a witness to your aging in a light of my own making, and I will I carefully catalogue
every new silver strand that appears like a shiny trinket pilfered by a magpie and woven into
the tasseled cornsilk of your hair. Already your downy temples have begun their transformation.
Soon, your mossy brows will glint like cattails gone to seed. Even the gosling fuzz softly covering
your cheeks will pale from amber to the white of milkweed silk. And eventually, naturally,
the perfect nest resting between your thighs will glitter and shine as if gilded by winter
with jewels of snowflakes and hoarfrost.
V. Braids, 1979
There are moments when you won’t even tell me what you see when you look away
as I pull your gaze out of the darkness surrounding you. I want you to reveal everything to me
freely so that I may capture in the contours of your face the shadows of your thoughts,
the full truth of you. When you look into the distance, look for me. Stand behind me
as I paint you. I want you to see your face as I do, a wolf moon rising
out of a January wheat field not yet blanketed by snow, gradually eclipsed
by the penumbra of your auburn hair.
VI. Night Shadow, 1979
Beneath my hand, you exist in both darkness and light. I hover above
you, the form of my shadow diaphanous and dissipating, a storm cloud releasing
everything it holds: water, ice, lightning, thunder. I rain down upon your body
and baptize you.
VII. In the Doorway, 1981
This is our house, a place for our prying eyes and ours alone: yours trying to see in me
the way that I see you; my own studying every particle of your being as an astronomer studies
the depths of the universe hoping to find the beginning of all creation. You stand naked,
filling the entrance both with the white light of stars and the dark matter that fills
the emptiness between them all. You and the doorway have become one and the same.
To enter our house means entering you.
VIII. Helga’s Words
quotes by Helga taken from the short documentary film Helga (Running Stag Productions, 2018)
He said I was his silent sounding board. He said there must be silence to realize what is behind the world.
He said I was starved. He said he gave me what I wanted and got what he wanted from me.
He said our time together was a dream. He said he was afraid of the dream disappearing if we talked about it.
I dreamed that I had fallen in love, and when I woke, I knelt
at the end of my bed and said, “Let it be true. Please
let it be true.” But how do you explain a dream? I knew
he was always painting himself in me. I knew I was a figment of his imagination.
Like a leaf blowing in the wind, I was there, but not there.
*
Three Portraits of a Sow
. . . if you get to know pigs, they’re very moody. They’re not sweet little animals at all. That’s what I like about them. They get depressed . . . — Jamie Wyeth
I. Portrait of Pig, 1970
Her teats dangle, flaccid and empty.
Her corkscrew tail has come unwound.
The eye we see remains screwed shut tight
as bristly fur and hay needle her skin.
Withered cobs at her feet bear
no sign of a mother’s appetite or desire
now that her suckling litter is off to slaughter.
II. Night Pigs, 1979
The cockerel will wait until sunrise to crow its condolences.
There’s nothing more for the boar to do tonight but sleep.
They leave the sow to sit litterless in golden lamplight
(continued, new stanza) beneath her own growing shadow blackening the wall above them all.
III. Winter Pig, 1975
She knows what can be found at the heart
of a whiteout because she stares into one kind of abyss
or another with every sunrise. She knows the cold, too,
the way its emptiness stings like frostbite
in the wind that blows across her empty teats.
And she knows just four hoof-steps
over the splintered threshold will deliver her into
a world of her own making at a time of her own choosing.
*
Surrounded by the Sea
Islands intrigue me. You can see the perimeters of your world. —Jamie Wyeth
I. Orca, 1990
I have painted your hands as pointed and sharp
as any harpoon that pierced a leviathan’s heart.
Now you must choose for yourself: Ishmael or Ahab?
Will you live to tell your own story? Or will you doom yourself
to a slow death floating among the flotsam of a ship
shattered by the mortal sin some god demands we fight?
There is nothing more I can do. I have given you all the knives
you need to flay this life to the bone.
II. Screen Door to the Sea, 1994
You clearly want to leave. The door stands ajar.
What is keeping you from disappearing into the sea-spray
and salt air? What is keeping you from slipping out
before the clock strikes twelve? What is keeping your eyes
locked on mine, your hands fidgeting like gulls near the surf line?
Why do I make you stay? What is keeping me
from painting the doorway empty like an open mouth crying out for you
after you have walked away?
III. Other Voices, 1995
Your fingertips caress the locked door, feel the pulse
of a muffled conversation like some version of Braille
you have not learned how to decipher. The voices on the other side
could be inviting you to enter, to walk on through without turning back
and lock the door behind you. Or they could be telling you to stay patient
with the world in which you live, to just turn around and go back home.
And then again, there might not be any voices at all; it might just be the sea.
All I know is that there is still time enough for you to live your life
on this side of the threshold. Whenever you feel the need to leave,
I swear to you I will paint the key.
*
Every Portrait Is a Self-Portrait
“I’m not just interested in fascinating faces or trees. I want to bore in deeper.” — Jamie Wyeth
I. Portrait of Andrew Wyeth, 1969
All fathers are oak trees to their sons, massive and domineering, casting a broad shadow across whatever field they claim. Though their roots run shallow, they run wide, rippling out and out from their thick trunk in search of water to feed their leaves and drink the world dry. It only takes a tiny injury—a broken branch, a redheaded woodpecker’s jackhammer bill, a passing bear claw scratch—to seed a burl that will keep expanding until the tree dies. What wound did you inflict to make the burl of your father’s face grow?
II. Pumpkin Head (Self-Portrait), 1972
Pumpkins grow best atop the ground rather than below, unburdened by the weight of earth and the tangle of roots. Every autumn we cut them and gut them and stuff them with candles until they smile brightly in spite of their own defilement. The Jack-O-Lantern that hides your own face stares at the world with empty eyes and a jagged, maniacal smile. You are the sole sign of life rising out of this fallow winter field. Unable to overcome the cold, your pumpkin head hangs in a blank canvas sky like a wan and sallow sun.
*
Kip Knott’s most recent full-length collection of poetry, Clean Coal Burn, is available from Kelsay Books. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Barren, Drunk Monkeys, Harpy Hybrid Review, HAD, La Piccioletta Barca, (mac)ro(mic), and New World Writing. More of his writing may be accessed at kipknott.com.
“I’m not just interested in fascinating faces or trees. I want to bore in deeper.” — Jamie Wyeth
I. Portrait of Andrew Wyeth, 1969
All fathers are oak trees to their sons, massive and domineering, casting a broad shadow across whatever field they claim. Though their roots run shallow, they run wide, rippling out and out from their thick trunk in search of water to feed their leaves and drink the world dry. It only takes a tiny injury—a broken branch, a redheaded woodpecker’s jackhammer bill, a passing bear claw scratch—to seed a burl that will keep expanding until the tree dies. What wound did you inflict to make the burl of your father’s face grow?
II. Pumpkin Head (Self-Portrait), 1972
Pumpkins grow best atop the ground rather than below, unburdened by the weight of earth and the tangle of roots. Every autumn we cut them and gut them and stuff them with candles until they smile brightly in spite of their own defilement. The Jack-O-Lantern that hides your own face stares at the world with empty eyes and a jagged, maniacal smile. You are the sole sign of life rising out of this fallow winter field. Unable to overcome the cold, your pumpkin head hangs in a blank canvas sky like a wan and sallow sun.
*
Kip Knott’s most recent full-length collection of poetry, Clean Coal Burn, is available from Kelsay Books. A new full-length poetry collection, Hinterlands, will be available later this year from Versification Publishing House. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Barren, Drunk Monkeys, Harpy Hybrid Review, HAD, La Piccioletta Barca, (mac)ro(mic), and New World Writing. More of his writing may be accessed at kipknott.com.
Islands intrigue me. You can see the perimeters of your world. —Jamie Wyeth
I. Orca
I have painted your hands as pointed and sharp
as any harpoon that pierced a leviathan’s heart.
Now you must choose for yourself: Ishmael or Ahab?
Will you live to tell your own story? Or will you doom yourself
to a slow death floating among the flotsam of a ship
shattered by the mortal sin some god demands we fight?
There is nothing more I can do. I have given you all the knives
you need to flay this life to the bone.
II. Screen Door to the Sea
You clearly want to leave. The door stands ajar.
What is keeping you from disappearing into the sea-spray
and salt air? What is keeping you from slipping out
before the clock strikes twelve? What is keeping your eyes
locked on mine, your hands fidgeting like gulls near the surf line?
Why do I make you stay? What is keeping me
from painting the doorway empty like an open mouth crying out for you
after you have walked away?
III. Other Voices
Your fingertips caress the locked door, feel the pulse
of a muffled conversation like some version of Braille
you have not learned how to decipher. The voices on the other side
could be inviting you to enter, to walk on through without turning back
and lock the door behind you. Or they could be telling you to stay patient
with the world in which you live, to just turn around and go back home.
And then again, there might not be any voices at all; it might just be the sea.
All I know is that there is still time enough for you to live your life
on this side of the threshold. Whenever you feel the need to leave,
I swear to you I will paint the key.
*
Kip Knott’s most recent full-length collection of poetry, Clean Coal Burn, is available from Kelsay Books. A new full-length poetry collection, Hinterlands, will be available later this year from Versification Publishing House. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Barren, Drunk Monkeys, Harpy Hybrid Review, HAD, La Piccioletta Barca, (mac)ro(mic), and New World Writing. More of his writing may be accessed at kipknott.com.
