for Charlie Knauss
‘Word merchant‘, ‘big talker‘, ‘word man‘, ‘rather talk
than eat‘, are names given he whose sandstorms
of syllables darkened the lightness or lightened the
darkness of conversations aimed at either lyrical,
or philosophical impulse, about life’s genial quirks
and oddities, or icy blasts of scientific research.
He holds truths poetically alive with atoms changing
and rearranging a stream of words that plunder
and soothe in his love of challenge, his chisel’s love
of the stone. Listening in sentences, he responds
in paragraphs, equally comfortable with mortal or
spiritual enigmas, thriving on mythology’s higher
gods and history’s lower aims. He wears openly
the scarfskin of his love affair with himself, and his
fear of the ‘other’ in his psyche. He survives on an
implacable faith in non-conformity, perfume drunk
on the ‘ambivalence of ambiguity’ that calls him to
the river’s edge below the trees, where he bends
low on creaky football knees to skip flat stones out
across moon-ribboned water — long side-arm throws,
sometimes skimming so freely the stone is free as
light. Moonlight on water swelling an imagination
taken from gauzy memory and a mother’s faith that
“the soul is both your judge and your sanctuary”,
faith he rode like skiffs of snow over wintry roads, never
sure if opinion or challenge was more important.
About Larsen Bowker
