ROBERT KNOX

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

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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