The Garden of Verse: The Last Man Prophesies the End of the World, Henry David Thoreau Speaks for the Wild, and Other Thoughts on April

           

The theme for this month's issue of Verse-Virtual is "your best poem." This is like being asked to name your favorite child, so we crafty poets, knowing how to read between the lines, came up with various ways to play with this idea without ever committing to a clear answer to this question. Sort of like a witness responding to the Mueller investigation. 

So here is the 'note' I wrote introducing my two linked-poems in the April issue:

 "I'm copping out on the difficult task of offering an unambiguous selection of 'my best poem,' a voluntary theme for this issue. Long ago, writing poems before I published any, I produced a poem with a favorite title: "The Last Man." It was an image befitting my youthful central themes of solitude and estrangement, a perceived alienation from most of my fellow humans inhabiting both tiny rural hamlets and big cities. I'd sampled both. I don't have that poem any more. Instead, I've tried updating that loner stance through imagining the condition of a solitary, de-gendered survivor in a world ravaged by the climate apocalypse toward which we are stumbling, eyes wide-blinded. 
          I then attempted to rhyme these notions against a vision of "the last man" both to know from experience and to prophesy in behalf of the American wild, Henry David Thoreau."

Here's an excerpt from the first poem, titled "The Last Man":

He cleans his shoes with dusty walks,

fills his lungs with every hour's darkling spite,

hides in his bed of unwashed rags

lest anyone (but who?) observes that his

sheets have stood up and left,

giving up on him

as he has given up

            on so many things

his ineptitude

his car sobs in the night

his stars pick his pocket

he follows the eyes of yesteryear's teenagers

in imaginary streetcars

hours so late that no one notices where they go,

or where he goes,

or where shee/ goes

            without him

 



A here's an excerpt from the poem about Thoreau, titled "The Last True Man," which I should better describe as a prose-poem:

He knew railroad men and lawyers, local farmers, doctors
with their bad news
and perhaps not the last, but one of the finest exemplars of the last generation
of Penobscot hunters and fishers, the newspaper-reading Polis,
who butchered before him the carcass of the moose he had killed,
sickening Henry  
while winning the white nature-lover's respect for his native mastery of the wild.
He knew scientists, botanists, zoologists to whom he served up
a new species of fish, which they neglected to name
for him.
He corresponded with European naturalists
on the life and death of forests, pioneering the science of forest succession

You can find these poems at: http://www.verse-virtual.com/robert-knox-2019-april.html

And find the issue's full contents at 
http://www.verse-virtual.com/poems-and-articles.html