KNOT Magazine
Fall Issue 2022
Jonathan Locke Hart
I.
The east and west of our skin
Comes and goes as in a dream
The wind rises and falls
And the crow perches on the sill
And the trees at Haslemere
Line the tracks and platforms
The chalk hills and cliffs ahead, behind
As we bore through to Portsmouth Harbour
The question of breath and touch lies
On the air that falls away
From the train that gains and glints,
The sun shimmering on steel and seats
The windows glaze, the eyes glaze.
The tint of autumn almost here.
This land and film are like the cases
Of maps, scores, manuscripts in the British
Library. Hands make, mend, extend,
Ears hear and are deaf, eyes blind and are blind,
The fingers of scribes, musicians, print-makers,
Poets move and are moved, drift in time
And, like whispers of the flesh, evanesce
Into the time-space continuum
Like promises of childhood and love,
The clouds gathering over the hills.
III.
The evening settles down in the Solent
There the Mary Rose went down, the sky slates
The water, the memory of memory
Fades in the break of night, our aunt gone,
The era unlit, a dying star, bones
Resting their traces of the Big Bang, done
In the wake of time, as if time had a start
And a finish. Her hair she put up, and full
Of winter the end came, after so much,
Dead in spring when all came back
The snow, sleet, rain, the after bloom of the moon,
And her laughter fleeing forever
In a night without stars or when the stars hide
From hiding itself. Eternity
Is a long time without time. The clouds spread out,
Carpet the horizon as night falls.
She said, after her stroke, “Go home. Find room.”
Year in, year out. Nature is hard. Nature
Gives and takes. I would hold her hand while she
Cursed me, the fates, all that had left her
With such abandon. The hand gives, the hand
Takes. In the wake of this love,
On the tongue, in hand, the ash gathers
Leading from the water: remember.
II.
Tunnels are the rest, lacuna, gulf,
Abyss, the mise en abȋme, the uncanny tell
Or maybe they are just tunnels still
An engineer this mythology
Of tunnels and he, she, might flinch
Or laugh. Humanists, poets, artists
Are such a lark, larks being such
Literary birds. Tunnels are dark
And when two trains pass there they need trust
And good engineering, but a poet
Might imagine more, have his, her own
Dream of Scipio, not looking down
But blind, with tunnel vision, a human,
Losing perspective on empire and love
And why we live in a wild time that knows
Price but not value: in the sun we drench
And bleach away care. The crows are long gone
And their song we do not know because there is
So much we do not know.
Perhaps we live in a tunnel, the earth
Being a passage, perhaps from light
As in a mead hall through which the crow flew
Where warriors left their swords for books
The sun and moon at exit and entrance.
IV.
You told him lightning and forever
You let him down with a thump when he mentioned
The heat of a thunderstorm and all the time
You scoffed and scolded him as if he had made
All this up. You had told him the more he said
The more you would shun him. He stopped believing
In words, in anything you had ever said.
He was a fool. That is the way it was
And what puzzled him most was how, except
For a few words here and there, you could
Drop him like a hot pan, to rattle
And bang on the floor. Who the hell was he
To insist, to prolong, to annoy, to persevere
In the long night of the stars even as
Venus you would chase him all over the wastes?
But there are many sides to the geometry
Of love and you had your reasons and your heart
Is not the winter it seems in a season
Without boots, and he should remember you
As you said you were.
V.
The fact that you have done, gone and done,
The fit you threw when you were through, means
What it means it seems, like a tree given
To magpies, squawking and picking on lesser
Birds. There are no facts. There is no heart. Only
A dreamer would not notice that you said
You could not do without him, but really
Did not want anything much to do
With him. It was all so conversational,
So convincing, as if Demosthenes
Had spoken to an audience of one,
And the wind died as his heart died.
And so the long broken promise, the pleading,
Recedes as the tide. So much debris
Is left on the sand. Poetry
Is barely worthy to describe
The cold action of a thankless mind
Masquerading as a heart. You act well
For the stage of ambition’s empire, but
Then who really cares about a friend in ruin?
VI.
He gave you what he could, and you turned
They asked you to take something from him
And you did and complained about the work
Of skinning and shaving his bones
For an ossuary for the almost
Living. Teachers are museums
For a consuming world. The rain
It rains every day. The wind
Howls. A wounded storm
On the downs, the cliffs
Precipitous, the insults gratuitous
The neglect a ruined barn.
The world is with us, the world dismisses us
The oak is broken on the hill
This sea rises high against the cliff
This ship a heart unkeeled. He stayed up
Nights to help and see what he got
A bevy of cowards brave in their words
Let the birds sing in the hedges. See the wolves
So maligned, when humans bay much more,
See how I might remake
A dunicad for thinking
There might be a bond
In the love of words, the jazz
Of ideas. But instead this hand of dust
This scatter of earth on a dark sea
And leave the bones for gulls, this empire
A military-industrial graveyard.
Born in Canada, poet and literary scholar Jonathan Locke Hart earned a BA, MA, and PhD from the University of Toronto and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. He has taught literary theory, intellectual and cultural history, and creative writing at universities in Canada, France, China, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
His collections include Unforgetting Private Charles Smith (2019), The Burning Lake (2016), Musing (2011), Dreamwork (2010), Dream Salvage (2003), Dream China (2002), and Breath and Dust (2000). His work has appeared in Harvard Review, Mattoid, Quarry, The Antigonish Review, among other journals, and has been translated to several languages, including Estonian, Slovenian, Chinese, Greek, Polish, and French.