Upload
lynne-knight
View
214
Download
2
Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
The Unlimited MoodAuthor(s): Lynne KnightSource: The Iowa Review, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Winter, 1997), p. 119Published by: University of IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20154509 .
Accessed: 16/06/2014 19:57
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
.
University of Iowa is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Iowa Review.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 62.122.76.54 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 19:57:29 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Lynne Knight
The Unlimited Mood
for Forrest Hamer
Sleepless late one night I examined the infinitive:
to place. What would be the agent?
Hands, memory: I tried to place him.
After a while, I remembered.
He was the one in love with bones.
In love with water over bones that had been thrown
from ships like scraps from meals,
like slops, like next to nothing
though he knew the record of that suffering would make its way along the seafloor
to the coast, ooze up through heavy sand,
flood through reed and marsh grass,
spread through earth, disturb the foot of someone walking? not stones but a calling, heaved against the insole?
until he lay his whole length down on sunwarmed grass,
pressing his good ear to cries and moans
blue at their center, blue in their nimbus,
blue as the water they had sunk through. He would lie listening to these blues
and know to place their origin in salty waters rising from the heart,
ancestral tears he would not know
what to do with until he thought to sing,
and, singing, heard the dead
instruct him where to place his grief: Here.
Where sorrows wash across your face and disappear.
119
This content downloaded from 62.122.76.54 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 19:57:29 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions