Echoes: Verse 4, Michael Knoll

Prison Letter
by Michael Knoll

You ask what it's like here
but there are no words for it.
I answer difficult, painful, that man
die hearing their own voices.  That answer
isn't right though and I tell you now
that prison is a room
where a man waits with his nerves
drawn tight as barbed wire, an afternoon
that continues for months, that rises
around his legs like water
until the man is insane
and thinks the afternoon is a lake:
blue water, whitecaps, an island
where he lies under pale sunlight, one
red gardenia growing from his hands --

But that's not right either.  There are no
flowers in these cells, no water
and I hold nothing in my hands
but fear, what lives
in the absence of light, emptying
from my body to fill the large darkness
rising like water up my legs:

It rises and there are no words for it
though I look for them, and turn
on light and watch it
fall like an open yellow shirt
over black water, the light holding
against the dark for just
an instant: against what trembles
in my throat, a particular fear,
a word I have no words for.

       "After spending seven years in prison I wonder if the sameness of life here is so much different from the sameness which (Wallace) Stevens felt, and which fueled his desire to write.  In one of his poems, 'The Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,' Stevens speculated that God and Imagination were one.  He envisioned a central imagination, a kind of room, in which all human beings were connected, a place where the candle of the imaginatin shone over the darkness of separation and discontent.  Here, for Stevens, the 'world imagined' was the 'ultimate good,'...
       As it did for Stevens, writing has given me the power to alter the dimensions of this world, to see beyond the myopia of prison into whatever exists beyond.  My poems, most of them, begin with a concrete, literal imge, and, when they work, expand outward to illuminate the territory of the imagination" 'a brief light in a sky above guntowers.'"  - Michael Knoll, May 1983

Knoll, Michael. "Prison Letter." The Light from Another Country: Poetry from American Prisons. Joseph Bruchac. New York: Greenfield Review Press, 1984. Print.