Bill Knott

Not having a mouth is no joke! Imagine an ax
left by somebody, sinksank into a tree trunk:
and each day you go by, the embedded ax seems
higher, higher, until finally, one day, jumping,
you’re just barely able to brush the fine of
the grain of the bottom of the axhandle with
your fingertips — and yet the tree has not grown.
Nor have you shrunk. Imagine: imagine trying
to explain this to someone if you didn’t have
a mouth.

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Bill Knott’s poetry collections include The Naomi Poems, Book One: Corpse and Beans (1968), Becos (1983), Outremer, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize (1988), Laugh at the End of the World: Collected Comic Poems 1969–1999 (2000), The Unsubscriber (2004), and others, including dozens of self-published volumes. A prolific painter as well as a long-time professor at Emerson College in Boston, Bill Knott’s eccentric demeanor as well as his gritty, brilliant work has garnered for him a passionate following of readers. He died in 2014. He spent his last years in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, not far from Carson City, Michigan, where he was born and where he is buried.

This poem is reprinted with permission of Robert Fanning, the Executor for the Estate of William Knott.