in memoriam Bill Knott
With the cold front
came news of your death—
a failed bypass—
and a skim of snow
that vanishes at the sun’s touch.
Soon, only shadows are white,
like the letters
I keep trying to form
as my pen runs out of ink.
I live in an Appalachian hollow in the Juniata watershed of central Pennsylvania, and spend a great deal of time walking in the woods. Here’s a bio. All of my writing here is available for reuse and creative remix under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. For attribution in printed material, my name (Dave Bonta) will suffice, but for web use, please link back to the original. Contact me for permission to waive the “share alike” provision (e.g. for use in a conventionally copyrighted work).
For what it’s worth, that actually happened. My black ballpoint pen ran out of ink just as I was trying to draft this poem in my pocket notebook. Instead of the snow melts, I got the snow me.
I’m thinking Bill Knott would’ve had a much better idea what to do with that irony.
the snow me
fades; yet we
must chisel language