Tag: Kip Knott

Every Portrait Is a Self-Portrait by Kip Knott

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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. 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.

Surrounded by the Sea by Kip Knott

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Surrounded by the Sea

         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.

*

Jamie Wyeth – Orca
Jamie Wyeth – Screen Door to the Sea
Jamie Wyeth – Other Voices

Three Portraits of a Sow by Kip Knott

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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

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

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

beneath her own growing
shadow blackening
the wall above them all.

III. Winter Pig

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.

*

Kip Knott’s debut full-length book of poetry, Tragedy, Ecstasy, Doom, and so on, is currently available from Kelsay Books. His second full-length book of poetry, Clean Coal Burn, is forthcoming later in 2021, also from Kelsay Books. He lives in Delaware, Ohio, with his wife and son, four cats, one dog, and a Chilean rose hair tarantula. More of his work may be accessed at kipknott.com.

Andrew and Helga, Lost and Found by Kip Knott

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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.

*

Kip Knott’s debut full-length collection of poetry, Tragedy, Ecstasy, Doom, and so on, is available from Kelsay Books. A second full-length poetry collection, Clean Coal Burn, is forthcoming later in 2021, also from Kelsay Books. More of his work may be accessed at kipknott.com.

Love Poem by Kip Knott

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Love Poem

The paper heart that I’ve carried in my chest
has finally caught fire. It’s burned for six nights
now. There’s no snuffing the white flames
that flicker up my throat. Arteries and veins cauterize,
bones sizzle, a network of fuses feeding one
explosion. My mind glows, a new star hot enough
to fuse atoms. These words are its radiation.

*

Kip Knott’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The American Journal of Poetry, La Piccioletta Barca, Still: The Journal, and trampset. In addition, he is a regular monthly contributor to Versification. His debut book of poetry, Tragedy, Ecstasy, Doom, and so on, is currently available from Kelsay Books. His second full-length collection of poetry, Clean Coal Burn, is due in 2021, also from Kelsay Books. More of his work can be accessed at kipknott.com.

Watching 2001 with My Son the Film Major by Kip Knott

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Watching 2001 with My Son the Film Major

I think somewhere there is a room
which I am living
an old man

in the future . . .

—Franz Wright

When the ape tosses the bone
2 million years into the future,

my son whispers, “Jesus Christ,”
and I see myself in him,

or at least myself as I was
more than forty years before

when I muttered the name
of the savior I believed in then.

My son has grown up
a non-believer in anything

remotely spiritual, proudly
faithless, fervently secular,

refusing even to utter
“under God” during The Pledge

every morning back in high school
when it crackled over the intercom

like a distant signal from space.
When HAL sings “Daisy”

slower and slower as he dies,
my son visibly mourns for him.

I mourn inside for the child
I once could hold entirely

in my arms. My son
leans closer to the screen

when the light show begins,
psychotropic streaks of color

illuminating his awe-struck
yet perfectly sober face.

I was high the first time
these lights transported me

to an otherworldly realm,
and laughed ecstatically

at the visions before me
like some possessed believer

enraptured in the presence
of his monolithic God.

When at last we reach the end,
that moment when the luminous

star child hovers over the world
like a miracle born

of a universe that created itself
out of nothing,

my son and I begin to cry,
together yet separate.

 

Kip Knott’s most recent book of poetry, Tragedy, Ecstasy, Doom, and so on, is available from Kelsay Books. New work may be found or is forthcoming in The American Journal of Poetry, Burningword Literary Journal, perhappened, and Typishly. More of his work may be accessed at www.kipknott.com.