ROBERT
KELLY

I never went to Rutherford only
himself ever made me stand
in vision over the Falls
of the Passaic

can you imagine
what it would have been like
all of us around the Old Man
honoring him and being
honored by his genuine slippery
attentions? Paul
wanted me to go out with him
“many a time” but I’m probably
making up the many,

once upon a time
to Jersey
beyond the copper
domes of Jersey City

Hamilton’s Weehawken
valhalla, the fallen
meadows sprawled around Newark,
that insidious churchman
Archbishop Marchenna who
ran the diocese for the Primate
Gerald Shelley himself
the descendant of the same Mont
Blanc I sheltered under
word by word entrancing
enlacing
                     until the hour fell
and it was now,

and farewell Jersey.
Farewell Union City of burlesque and
Lenten Passion Play
“the Oberammergau of America”
Christ dying in purple light
while Meyerbeer’s march from Le Prophète
convulsed the auditorium,

one wept, one does weep
at such things, that simple death
meant to revive us

we live forever
it seems
in some fashion

Ceravolo, Brainerd,
Spicer, Olson,
Blackburn,
how are they different
having closed their books

except for us to open.
A cartoon of a man on his deathbed
worrying about a comma.
Tomb of the Unknown Poet
crushed under the bridge at Mostar,

what do we know of anything,
even the best of us just fantasy-mongers,
the silly narrative of Dante waking the dead.

OK. I have said some names
I honor. Steve Jonas
never had a chance. Listen to him
if you get a chance. He knew
how to make Pound’s text listen
to us. In those days they called that Jazz.

31 May 1994

https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/rk_manuscripts/1221/

Monday moonday

silver opportunity

somebody loves me

eels in the channel

sky for breakfast

Lent never ends

folklore though is

always beginning.

Please understand

a single sentence

with a million verbs,

this little village

bodiced in snow.

The baker breathes

secrets into her bread,

already the snow

plow grates and grinds,

obedient, the sky

brightens.  Day

is a strange song,

faintly familiar,

merry words

to a sad tune.

2.

O I aspire

says the blue fire

under the saucepan

O I desire

says the husband

waiting to plunge

the teabag in.

3.

Go back to bed and wait—

eventually your vocabulary

will wake up,

stretch its syllables

and you will be magister again,

an ambassador from pastness,

you think of Schumann,

Wittgenstein, and cross

yourself tentatively—

endless churchyard

of the documented earth—

and all the words you never heard.

18 February 2019

Who bakes the bread

we eat in dream?

Ransack Babylon for its stone answers

or glue your ear we used to say

to the purling of the Nile, high tide

in the synagogue, sleek wet tile

pressed to the swimmer’s flank,

shadow shredded by Venetian blinds,

castaway oyster shells, remember, remember?

You were coastal to, a coy beach.

a serenade too soon forgotten—

and yet it nourishes, it smiles;

your skin teaches you that,

the academy of do-not-touch,

showcase jewelry

stifled by bright light,

I suffer all the absences,

you endure the presences,

steam drifts from the oven

the bread is breathing,

get back to your sonata,

your census of bright things,

everything is for sale

if you can find

the right kind of money,

listen up, that soprano

is waiting at the altar

you woke beside this morning,

leave out the punctuation and decide,

music has a way of getting longer,

is the oven still on, check the flame,

you stoked your fire and called it light,

you smell the bread now,

what can it be that so intrigues

against the government of the mind,

in the ad soft song of nation state?

I hear her calling,

it must be true,

I hear her calling

is that loaf ready yet,

and what is dream

without a spoon

to gouge the soft stuff up

and swallow it,

even before the bread cools down

enough for the knife to know it,

and what is sleep without a knife?

Words scattered over audience

restless in their seats—

some catch, some stick,

some float past the ushers

out into the freedom.

We are trapped in hearing.

Each of us misses a word

now and then, not the same word,

probably most of them get missed

until all that talk

there is nothing said

and silence is allowed to begin—

music, that is, the closest

we can ever get to real silence.

17 February 2019

for Charlotte

Let it be lapis

the shape I give

shorn from the sky

and on the middle finger

worn, to set the matter

straight, the world

upright, firm, revolves

around our promises,

the sky the sky

17 February 2019