The Hand of Novelty In A Natural Death


By 1943 his hand was never held, always wringing
as no gripped thing in lack of anyone to answer.
So he grimaced with them and clutched at armrests
with white knuckles making snow-capped peaks
above the Hindu Kush on that Aeroflot Flight
carrying O Mighty One to touch down in Teheran -
with his escort guards of just 27 fighter planes….
Stalin did not want death not ever…ever,
And on return to Moscow he never flew again.

Yet that hand could still sign death, violent
death more regular than his use of toilet paper.
What was a Politburo apparatchik here or gone?
or a Commintern Chekist come to full term?
That hand could waive lives at Beria or Malenkov,
his obedient killing dogs, so that Jewish artists
like Mikhoels were run down by Cheka trucks out
smashing down the launch-champagne of Russia street.

And then, the hand…prescribed his own doctors.
The Chekist, Yagoda, was of course, executed.
All Gorkyists! doctors dealt in death by course;
failure to cease it was capital crime against the hand.
The hand, clutching for the water bottle, for Pravda.
And the fingers like eyes imprinting the fact that his
Doctors had all been waived to torture in his prisons.
Even Vinogradov, his personal physician was
In irons when the unseen hand made its stroke.

And after that last Stroke, as he choked, he woke -
“It was a terrible glance, insane or…angry, full of
the fear of death…suddenly he lifted his left hand
as though he were pointing to something up above
and bringing down a curse on all. The gesture was
incomprehensible and full of menace.” So Svetlana
Stalin said. And Martin Amis* adds. “What was he
(Stalin) doing? He was groping for his power.”

Here's the dexterity plague, active force of the evil hand,
as us that go at wringing hands, like new troglodytes who seek
out crafty novelty. The Novelty? Unlike most all of Russia
violated, this was Stalin dying a natural death.



* Martin Amis - Koba The Dread

THE WIND FROM SOMEWHERE?

Or GOD'S FAN




This high wind
will skin trees inside out.
Its hand
will part the gum trees like a barber
Looking for
loose limb-lengths to throw down

It will pick
up one improvident white-anted oak tree
And toss it
down for rot, even the solid branches will
Go down
the border like bodies after territorial war.

Anything loose
will be rocked till it breaks away.
Everything weak
be pulled from its thin belief stem
All that is
on the loose will be spun off into chaff.

This will be
on a day after the equinox, or a day else.
Neither flood,
nor yet a fire, just an increasing inflatus
Just a winding
wind to take that afflatus out our sails.

Then leaves
of our books will take to the sky as fast
As autumn’s y
ellowed poplars, the popular text on
Each page
will turn over and over in unread ozone.

Till this wind
eats the atmosphere, and throws down
The wires
powerless outside of the melodramas like strings
of a lolly puppet
blowing in a Judy-punched world.

And when the Some
where wind has spintered, has gathered
Has blown
our heaps and heaps of rubbish and rubbished it.
The where-going
wind will stay a little while as a fan…

for a flame.

SUSTAINABILITY IS THE DRONE OF OLDER MUSIC


Creed or creedless, I
walk the Urban Ore-Body
One of the people consuming or
non-consuming, consumable
Laying down or not laying down
extractable disposables
Out my globally unrenewed
or renewable mind.

Pastoral After A Fifteen Year Marriage


I am the one in the window
Watching rain that doesn’t come down;
I'm the one in a landscape of sorrow
The bones grate toward the ground.

The light on the gumtrees falls sidelong
To colour paint off the leaftips in erase,
Only the water-wash grey in the clouds
Sticks to this palette, my face.

Seven kookaburra vice a garden fence
Sniping the vegie patch of last worms;
A grey feather falls as day fades, darkens
.... I lose in love taken to terms.

Time passes! but clover in flower's no pastime
Wind shakes the mulch leaves in squirm;
A flight of kookuburras down the evening
Is the last hurrah of the worm.

I am the one in a porthole window
Watching rain as it doesn’t descend;
I'm the one left in the sorrow
Where our sinking partnership ends.

Trentham, 1992

Wayne David Knoll