20 September 2013

As soon as it comes home
it will be me
again or for the first time
who can decide
out here where the trees
publish so many
variations on the same news
the way we music.

from RK's Traubenritter Maxims

This gentle clack of billiard balls on the green felt behind me makes me think of the endless rolling and occasional collisions of asteroids, spread out along the ecliptic mostly, or rogues in free space tumbling along rebel orbits of their own. We pass unscathed through their geometries. Or do we? Do those bodies too (as the ancients surmised about the canonical planets) cast influences our way, subtle shifts of love and aversion and indifference, so that by them also our moods (those vagrant beasts who live our lives for us) are shaped?

BOOK

The opera of the faraway
like a Victorian children’s book
I hear voices inside the word
of old adventurers, their lions,
glaciers, killer whales,
the green of Shalimar
blood-spattered as with roses,
the opera of all we never knew
here in our trembling hands.

Robert Kelly reads at T/Space, the art space of architect Steven Holl, in Rhinebeck NY, 7 September 2013