While Doing Yard WorK

By Kip Knott

Everything is repeated, in a circle. History is

​a master because it teaches us that it doesn’t

​exist.

— Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

This summer is finally nearing its end.

I can smell distant fires, oak smoke 

and cherrywood, on the shifting wind.

All but dormant, yellowing

grasses don’t need to be cut,

and milkweed already seeds the air.

I rake a few overeager leaves 

into a pile too small to cover me

as I am now, but large enough

to bury the child I used to be.

That child used to hide with his dog, 

a collie his father named Rebel, 

in the kennel beneath the Dutch elm 

to avoid the evening news and all

the violent stories he knew brought him 

one step closer to adulthood every night. 

And now that future he worked so hard 

to avoid has become his present, 

and he and I set the rake aside 

and lay down upon the tiny pile of leaves. 

We look up through branches 

into a fractured sky for a hint of sunlight, 

but we can’t see past the smoke 

of all the fires that refuse to die. 

This piece is one of three poems that originally appeared in Issue 1 of Handwritten & Co, in print.

Kip Knott’s most recent full-length book of poetry, Clean Coal Burn, is available from Kelsay Books. A new full-length book of poetry, Hinterlands, will be available later this year from Versification Publishing House. Follow him on Twitter at @kip_knott. More of his writing may be accessed at www.kipknott.com.