Davy Knittle

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Speaking about it, the subject changes.
– Gil Ott

 

actual patience with the weather
and monster movies

awake the bright half of the night
the bright half, a storm with a name

beasty feelings about a named storm
beasty aftermath

this one’s just windy
tiny branches come down

noise coming from you from everywhere
and I orient to try to make it sound

he was a poet’s poet means he was
a hugger, invited them to stay

in his living room
stay here in the poem a long time

stay driving: from here
to Kansas City

stay hanging out in the vehicle with me
visit with Kansas City in Brandon’s poem

getting to Brandon’s ethical chapel
of hanging out with him in his sentences

hang out with Brandon on May 2nd
or a week from it three years out of four

in two states and three cities
one mostly a town

it being night and watching
a monster movie with you for class

being too small in a monster movie
having class near a practice room

and hearing a monster movie’s music
making of myself a monster movie

then taking Brandon out with me
to fill in my shadow

it’s the shadow that makes Ellen stop
in Nosferatu when his claw-outline

gets serious about her heart
being at work

thinking of Brandon at work, flossing
his tie over his shoulder, spitting blood

thinking of Nosferatu at work
Orlok sucking blood on the night shift

composing them both into the edges
hanging out in the edges like a pie

crimping its crust with you with a fork
and taking it to a reading

making a peach pie with you
and turning it like a dial

ideal whip cream
driving with you to Kansas City

and you taking an interstate’s turns
spinning a combination lock on a bag

terns: those birds a poem likes
poems love this shit in movies:

expressionist weather
a right time piccolo

a night one, an evening one
a bird one that no one is sure of

bird or instrument
cake or death

noses or Ronald Reagan
Richard Nixon or Mr. Potato Head

Herbert Hoover Middle School
or Matthew Henson postmark

Matthew Henson sesquicentennial
behind us by a couple of weeks

records of light at the pointiest
parts of the world

orient the evening with you so that its
points face out like a star

eight sided: awake half the time
what are we going to do

with all of this fruit
rounding up the fruit in the night

holding an aspect of you
and rounding up your parts

your hurt hand reading
your square daytime 45 degree gaze

any list I’d make is swimming
after you, it’s your rigorous

standing and sitting
in the frame everyday

you’d make a list and I’d
make one like it

Julia made up a song for the baby
and never heard it in Gil’s poem

a poem’s poem, one you and I
could hang out in for a while

this document, this one, can’t help
but toward the sound of you

in a poem I turn us open
halfway, try to orient the line

on the page to you and your
face and resonance

the way I get to circulate in you
big and in stripes like an airplane

like spreading a thing on toast halves
halves like wolves like to go by twos

breeding pairs, list of famous
individual wolves

my eyes go high up the wall
like a sneeze

when I see you looking
my ears go and their shadow tilts

above them even better
union of me and my ears

my ears and I go sit on a lawn
the monstrous behavior of teenagers

having been one, units of two like interstate
and interstate

you and me
and me and teenage me

him seeing you and pleased as from
across a lawn

it shakes up our planes to drive by it all
to go between here and Kansas City

with only you in the car, driving grips
us into this time

your parents in a pair
and going to see them in Kansas City

and driving and it all working in together
where did you get used to it, to putting

a palm on me: how did your palm
come to be there: my interest in you

driving: my interest in you
maybe you’ll visit with me today

there’s a structure for it
a way our weeks go, in and out

of them and going to
work the next morning

but maybe you’ll visit with me
anyway, driving or wherever we are

I could never write from your being enough

after Alice Notley

a part we once had
the last ones in a building

with the stairs that rise and fall
dogs we were of breathing’s detail

in your office I was
pig of the year eating a carrot

in my apartment I was
depth eating a sandwich all night

and turning the street on me
so unto the room

I lie me out alone as we might
as I would you

at night the ignition of nothing above us
night busy in its wrists

I share walls with neighbors
being exempt from them

ideas of my other bodies
at other times like public

at night I dream a liquid into
a plasma a solid to a hole

plot in the hole a next step
with lenses, a periscope

that playground joke: your
epidermis is showing

we’d better go catch it
imprint it on one another

while we have the years
thirteen moons and the

thirteenth has a month that
never happens

I want a calendar to play
descant to the calendar

so I can take our time
let’s find a way to sit down

a bench is a public myth everyone
wants to rest on

a street in the progress of at night
I see it as we may

a wish under stars that aren’t
some bodies are too public

to ever be anonymous
sometimes I’m just a guy

I have no say in it
or in my age or in my lips all wet

with talking with taking
them in — come see

some day my kite will
slot itself in power lines

I live understanding this
one natural boy adapting his hands

this is the this we visit
this occupation: a sentence

that’s an act unto its own
as I now pronounce you

the act in it is all there is
I hereby declare that I

can’t speak for walking
some day I’ll slide off

too greased from the internet
and wishing to be able to read poems

come sit in this swing with me
it had to be us: one at a time

breathing splits us up
from being two piles of meat

put your voice in this
here’s where to put your air

it won’t be so long
I walk for you and strangers

hoping to see or hear
your voice in them

set me up here it’s okay
I’ll look out from wherever I am

breathing elects me
otherwise I hinge I sit

Davy Knittle

Davy Knittle is the author of the chapbooks empathy for cars / force of july (horse less press 2016) and cyclorama (the operating system 2015). His poems and reviews have appeared recently in Jacket2, Fence, Denver Quarterly and The Brooklyn Rail. He lives in Philadelphia where he curates the City Planning Poetics series at the Kelly Writers House.