​Robert Knox is a creative writer, a freelance journalist for the Boston Globe, a blogger on nature, books and other subjects, and a rabid gardener, who makes his home in Quincy, Massachusetts. A graduate of Yale (B.A.) and Boston University (M.A. in English literature), he is a former college teacher and newspaper editor, whose stories, poems, and creative nonfiction have appeared in numerous publications. His poems have recently appeared in Verse-Virtual, Guide to Kulchur Creative Journal, The Poetry Superhighway, Bombay Review, Earl of Plaid, Rain, Party & Disaster Society and Semaphore Journal. He serves as a contributing writer for Verse-Virtual, an online poetry journal. A collection of his poems, titled "Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty," will be published this year by Coda Crab Books.

       The Alligator's Approach to the Birds

It is not for everyone,
    this Paradise of Birds       
The wingless ones who stand beneath the shade-cover 
             on the boardwalk pavilion
are given leave to watch,
a dozen brown and watery feet away, 
the color of old trees glimpsed in a window's reflections,
bits of shell and water-eaten leafage at the base

We'll get no closer
The birds know how to measure distance --
    and ability, we have no wings to fly --
They land on a dime, on a dollar-sized island
We stand on ceremony,
the gnawing anxiety of wet feet,
as if water itself were toxic
We are lingering glances and superannuated vigilance
But eyes cannot hurt them
We pose no threat to the Paradise of Birds

Who brings the stork's babies? 
We question one another 
A head like the curve of an umbrella handle 
    turned upside down,
The wood stork is patterned silk on top,
yards of plump white plumage below 
Its young both indescribable and hard to glimpse

Not half-brown like the Anhinga,
whose adolescents are caramel feathered 
and bear allegiance to a race of beige and mustard-colored snake people 
and live below the waters now 
in a world we cannot see
We satisfy our craving for vision with the Paradise of Birds

Birds, we know, are merely people
    in a different dress
(though cannot the same be said of trees?)
They too enjoy a fine March day
in the face of a smiling sun, fish a-plenty
(where we live no such days exist)
They toy with the furniture inside their nests,
adjust the framing, smooth the slipcovers,
content to ignore the squawks of the babes 
    demanding to be fed

They are beyond such needs 
    in weather like this --
pellucid, clear as glass, free of insects and parasites,
holding wings high to dry in the sun
like Washing Day in some earlier century 
(though without the elbow grease)
all pleasure, no work

They are nature's machines for turning air and water
    into the grace of flight
that miracle of which we are always bereft,
banned forever from the Paradise of Birds

The herons, winged heroes, glitter-glide besides the humans,
aging creatures who crave to worship 
    in the glow of their beauty
Who will fly only when they leave 
    this heavier career behind one final time,
seeking in immaterial flight some greater good 
(seeking entrance then 
    to the Paradise of Birds)

Who now fly only eyes closed, limbs inert
in the phantasms of the liberated chambers of the brain,
    those rooms they cannot decorate or conform to will
Who soar only in their minds, 
    their mind's eye of stimulus and love
Who gaze with longing, and 
    wonder 
at the Paradise of Birds

2.
Only one beast disturbs the Paradise of Birds
It syncopates the water
    in brownish segments
a disturbance in the watercolor
    as if old paint got up to walk

It motors in silence,
like appetite
or time, or the silent renewal of 
    solid earth beneath your feet
Arrives like surprise
Like thought made visible,
an idea given shape
Like Hegel's notion of history
a submerged and troubled mass forming for revolt

Yet though subtle as a reptile
its metrics are known 
by those clear-eyed cousins roosting 
    in the bare tops of the cypress trees,
mere skeletal frames and furniture 
    for the Paradise of Birds

And when the stick-legged guardians of heaven, their rapiers
    in their faces,
their light and parried weaponry
tied snuggly to their brains
espy the ancient enemy
They hoot their worries, in airy segmentation,
a ceaseless one-two-three,
warning all of the creature's trespass,

the reptile in the sally garden waters
    of the Paradise of Birds

Robert Knox is a creative writer, a freelance journalist for the Boston Globe, a blogger on nature, books and other subjects, and a rabid gardener, who makes his home in Quincy, Massachusetts. A graduate of Yale (B.A.) and Boston University (M.A. in English literature), he is a former college teacher and newspaper editor, whose stories, poems, and creative nonfiction have appeared in numerous publications. His poems have recently appeared in Verse-Virtual, Guide to Kulchur Creative Journal, The Poetry Superhighway, Bombay Review, Earl of Plaid, Rain, Party & Disaster Society and Semaphore Journal. He serves as a contributing writer for Verse-Virtual, an online poetry journal. A collection of his poems, titled "Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty," will be published this year by Coda Crab Books

THE REBEL ANGELS LOOK BACK by Robert Knox


​So in the last days of winter,
when the turn of the season will not come in the month that trumpets its arrival 
with leonine roar,
strutting its changeable hour, full of sound and fury,
because the poor earth below is still burdened with six-foot phalanxes 
of cold, slow-frozen dirty walls that once were exposed, in their modesty, 
as 'sidewalks,'

when the soul finds no sweet release in jumping the time to come, 
the whole graduated journey,
and so we launch tormented flesh straight to the days of eighty in the shade,
sun-burnished sand beneath the toes, 
warm saltwater sluicing the limbs
like the gurgling god of some peripatetic Neptune, green and endlessly inventive,
palms being palms, swaying heavy-handed, lifted overhead in some unsolicited blessing, 
familiar flowers looking like July,
creatures ordinarily clad stretched bare to the healing air

.... Well, in brief, we'll take it,
balm and anodyne, 
warm water, pleasant airs, fair breezes
and from the look of things (neighbors smiling like cream-fed cats)
nobody paying a dime for any of this

Till, thunder-struck on a summer's day, 
time's fell hour slices down, our curtain falls and 
villain check-out time, that winter of the imagination, 
looms before us,
we gather our share of remembrance to trundle northward,
icy patches sloughing beneath the wings of the homebound jet

And picturing once more, in the album of bittersweet remembrance 
those beatitudes with attitudes, the postures and sun-streamed smiles of those who 
recline as if forever on adjustable chairs in the rarefied greensleeves 
of heavenly breezes, balmy hours, occasional cloudiness, a few sprinkles just the other night 
dampening the towels and yesterday's pool wear, 
contemplating the body-poach of the hot tub later,
supper on the balcony,

how could we not feel (if only for an instant)
like the disobedient angels casting last looks at paradise lost 
as they are driven cruelly to a very warm place
which frankly -- at certain times, days of blizzards, blackouts, and broken trains --
does not sound too very terrible either