Enjoy a reading of The Knight of the Black Rose by Michael Williams, first published in Leaves from the Inn of the Last Home, September 1987. Buy Leaves from the Inn of the Last Home: https://amzn.to/39TClwb
The Knight of the Black Rose
And in the climate of dreams
When you recall her. when the world of the dream
expande, wavers in light,
when you stand at the edge of blessedness and sun,
Then we shall make you remember,
shalI make you live again
through the long denial of body
For you were first dark in the light’s hollow,
expanding like a stain, a cancer
For you were the shark in the slowed water
beginning to move
For you were the notched head of a snake,
sensing forever warmth and form
For you were inexplicable death in the crib,
the long house in betrayal
And you were more terrible than this
in a loud alley of visions,
for you passed through unharmed, unchanging
As the women screamed, unraveling silence,
halving the door of the world,
bringing forth monsters
As a child opened in parabolas of fire
There at the borders
of two lands burning
As the world split, wanting to swallow you back
willing to give up everything
to love you in darkness.
You passed through these unharmed, unchanging,
but now you see them
strung on our words-on your own conceiving
as you pass from night-to awareness of night
to know that hatred is the calm of philosophers
that its price is forever
that it draws you through meteors
through winter’s transfixion
through the blasted rose
through the shark’s water
through the black compression of oceans
through rock-through magma
to yourself-to an abscess of nothing
that you will recognize as nothing
that you will know is coming again and again
under the same rules.
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