ROBERT
KELLY

photos by Charlotte Mandell

Itchy creases
Mojave folds
o making movies
is a desert art,
coughing up
images out of emptiness,
borrowing darkness
so we can see.

2.
Green cheap floral pattern
flaps around her knees,
the wind.
Her legs are dirty,
mud-stained calves,
but where did the water come from,
or is it blood?
In mind-stained emptiness
we see what she sees,
footprints leading away.

3.
No faces yet.
Image is not identity,
image is the other
singing at us
from across the canyon,
arroyo,
river of no water.
An image is all beckoning,
questioning,
a catechism, a mid-term exam,
an image is a question
that no one asks.

4.
We are left with what we see,
as that woman must be,
alone in the desert
where movement is implied
by absences alone.
The mesa vanishes.
The hawk is gone.

5.
It is as when we dream
we wake with a single
image in mind,
nowhere to go with it,
no one to take it away.
Get up out of bed, that
theater of the night,
shake my head,
the green cloth flipping,
whose footsteps are they,
where did they go?

                                         17 August 2020

So sometimes less to say
dome of the white church
reflected in the canal
so green was the water that day,
the Christian boatmen
jogging on the shore
o lift me over river
they sang, lift me
over canal, let the dolphins
sway me to the altar
where the chaplain waits,
the man with such tight boots—

but I knew what they meant,
song always means the same thing. 

2.
We learn it early
the East is not a river
the Hudson is
but flows through the sea
by the time we get to know it.
We live on an island,
America is just across the bay.
Paumanok, island of skeptics
who in desperation if not despair
take to song.
                           Make
language pure again,
sing it to sleep.

3.
This is all about
theories of education.
Here is mine:
Surround the child with everything
and leave it alone.
Because you know by now
everything talks.
Silence is fierce listening. 

4.
Forgive me,
I have opinions
which are even
worse than ideas.
It takes hard work
to get rid of them,
purify yourself
from what you think.

5.
And you don’t need to be a Platonist
to climb over that fence—
it’s made of stone
but crumbling, light
shows through it where
you get a glimpse beyond–
a breathless moment, hoist,
and you’re over it
on virgin ground. 

6.
Cool first time this morning,
speaking of over,
my bare skin reminds me
autumn may yet be coming,
not yet, not soon, but some
day I will close this window
and the wasp will have to
fly away hummingly home.

7.
The dome could have been
in Williamsburg or Venice or India,
the canal anywhere,
but the river had to be here,
has to be here
where you hear it,
words can’t lie by themselves
you know, it takes me
or you to skew them, no,
the river has to be here,
running past, running fast,
running to keep true.

8.
Only the dome stays
more or less where it is,
where we see it shimmer
in swift current, lingering,
but notice how the image
has to keep trembling
to stay still. We do it too
and call it breathing.
The dome on the ground
we guess is behind us,
it doesn’t budge, we call it a church.

                                                     16 August 2020

It could be anything
it could be the weather
a tiger back in Yunnan
missing the regular
meals in the zoo
up there in the days when
we are all let go, set loose,
lost into the prowl of
it could even be now.

2.
But burdens slip off too
thud by your ankles so
lighter you limp on.
We all in one way or another
seem to be teenagers
coming back from the pool,
wet bathing suits inside our clothes.

 3.
That’s how we know.
Conscience molds us,
the process called time
shapes us old.
Acute awareness
of random realities,
the longer the leaner.

4.
I wish I could remember
all the places I hurried from,
all the books I read midway,
all the breakfasts I skipped,
all the music I turned off before the end.
Last night a Bach partita—
but which one?
Through the silence
I prayed my way to sleep.

 5.
The tiger is still in his cage,
maybe alas. The meadows
of Somerset lie low in late sun.
I keep getting born around here
but here keeps changing.
Brighton Beach. Alston
in the Pennines, highest town
in England, sorrow, sorrow,
the lead mines all closed down.
So there is still silver in the ground–
that’s what they mean when they say
being born is a consolation prize.

6.
Noises spoke us
alert in the dark.
Language everywhere,
no breath without its word.
No air without its breath.
We tried to understand what it meant
but it did not speak again.
What could the night possibly want
after all that we have given it?

7.
Little tufts of freedom
here and there,
enough to feed your rabbit
of a soul, your dribbling river
of a single tear. Try, try
to make me say something
you can understand
under or over all this mumble
of my guesswork.
It’s up to you to make me speak.

8.
Eden? Yes,
but there was no love there,
no passion, no embrace.
It was a glade of soft obedience—
and sometimes we pray to God
we still could be there,
make do with flowers and the changing light.

                                  15 August 2020

The sadness was all in me.
Outside was its ordinary self,
oranges and mirrors, blueberries
and wolves, nothing special,
you know the song
and nowhere noon.

2.
Measure me
I whispered to the moon
but his mind,
that bad boys’ crony
was elsewhere, his eye
on different scandals,
just dark by me.
So Measure me
I whispered a little louder
to the tree (American basswood,
our own kind of linden, tilia)
and he smiled the way they do.
The way they almost always do.

3.
So you see how trapped
I must have felt
(the feeling is passing away
even as I speak, scent of patchouli
on a woman who walked past,
Benedict Canyon, so long ago,
so many trucks going by,
where was I?),
trapped
in who I thought I was,
thought, that somber jailer
of our grown-up days.
Desist from thinking.
Hop a ride to Yerba Buena
don’t bother coming back.

4.
Life means sleeping
in someone else’s bed
every night for all the years
and call it yours.
You know how to do it,
you read the books,
Rabelais and Gildersleeve,
you know that language
keeps its distance from the thing,
you know identity
is the least of our worries
until it falls away
and leaves me looking at the sky,
stiff-necked, waiting
for a meteor to come by
and assure me it is summer
and Perseus is casting darts
now that Andromeda
is sad from the sea,
and stands there in the moonlit meadow
smiling at me, saying
the moon is too bright to see.

5.
When sadness is going
or almost gone
what takes its place?
Fly on the window screen,
wasp on a paper plate.
O yes, it’s daylight again,
they do come back, the days,
the centurion with his baton
leads them one by one
out of the dark, not a word,
but have you ever seen
a blue rose? here, take
this one, it grew for thee alone.

6.
But sadness is a fact,
usually the shadow
of someone who has just
passed by on their way
to being someone else
from the one we need.
Smell of patchouli,
street map of the Mission,
a cigarette. The years
seem to be winning
but then the hero comes
and rescues us in sleep.

7.
Don’t doubt your dinner
says the wolven to her cub,
it’s the least we can do,
be nourished and be ready.
Grown up to prowl and howl—
the moon needs you, and all
those strange people need the moon.
The wolf cub is too young to wonder why.

8.
See, when cyclists roll by
your house they’re always talking,
talking as they wheel along,
loud clear voices and you wonder
would they talk so brightly
if they sat, just sad together
under a leafy linden tree
like the one out back with whom
I hold so many conversations.

9.
Sadness just a shimmer now,
breath a moment
on the mirror then
clear image of myself again.
A window works better,
shows the other Holy alterity,
breakfast in the stars.

10.
But grief too
is a relief,
sadness is a lazy town,
just lie back and frown
and nothing to do except
accept and wipe your eyes
and guess it had to be.
With some reluctance
I totter to my feet, walk
down to the station
and take the bus to Fresno
where there is no past.
But then I remember
that waitress in the TexMex dive
and know that all the past
is my personal tattoo.
Get off the bus before it is too late.
                                                          14 August 2020