ROBERT
KELLY

Out of green sleep an answer thrums,
we know the pattern from the stars
the drumbeat just repeats.
Wake, look round. Trees,
mostly trees, and in the middle distance
cars going past, fast.
You knew all this while you were still asleep.

2.
But a hand reaches out
and touches your knee.
It is your own. See
how mysterious sleep is,
all images and no way home.

3,
I gave you trees now give me gaiety
the glad of going and of coming back,
Hecate’s daring dancers on Hera’s lawn,
she looks three ways at once
and right at you,
watch her women dance, their moves are words,
the weave of sense from tree to tree–
I told you to wake up but now it is almost too late.

4.
Because when you have seen them dance
it changes everything.
You want to reach out and touch them at least,
but that of all things is wrong.
The Dream Deciders told you that
long ago but you forgot.
Now say your Mass and wipe your lips
and thank the trees for telling you all this.

                                                         9 September 2019

photo by Charlotte Mandell

photo by Charlotte Mandell

Be up and be now
the weather insisted,
eyes open are best
to meet the maybe.
But the chair is sad
at last, and all the books
have read me blind—
am I only the echo
of what someone else sang?

2.
How the sand piles up
along the shore,
so clean, so clean!
as if it came from heaven
and the ocean keeps it pure,
I dreamed I was bringing
clean sand to the shore,
my gift to the weather
of what things are.

3.
Live by quotation
the way the Japanese
know where words come from
on their way to being said.
Live by creation, God-like and fresh,
live by rotation,
spinning in place
to keep singing in form,
live by donation,
give everything away.

4.
And still the radicals
cling to the characters,
images persist, their linger
is our language too.
Who first said ‘you’
and what did they see
with their startled eyes,
the very first stranger,
the other, the god?

5.
In the climate of repose
is there only one of me?
It’s morning, can’t I wake up
another in me to share
the burden of light, the quest
of outward, the same old new?

6.
You can tell I’m frightened,
anyone would be
who was me. And you there
with these words on a page
or screen before you,
don’t you feel a little edgy too?
When you’re reading
you never know what’s coming next—
just like morning on an ordinary day.

                                      11 August 2020

The street is a bone
we flesh along.
Timid ones,
ever asking.
Why do things
suckle us so well?
Nourished by evening
spill the new day.
By the birdbath
she was waiting,
things happen,
happen that way.
Look at the street sign,
guess at the truth—
she will lead you home
in her own sweet time
but will she let you go?
The story folds around you,
that is what they do.
You do right to be afraid,
or cautious at least
like sunrise in the treetops.

2.
Are we there yet is like
the always song.
Cars are not equipped
with answers, chariots
at least had horses and you know
they have heads to toss
and yea and neigh.
forgive the pun. The pain
of not knowing
where going
goes and why
and when. And then.

3.
She gave so much
we couldn’t leave.
Story of the earth,
Fomenko chronology,
we just got here,
Jesus had seen Abraham,
Babylon is yesterday
and Rome tomorrow
almost, almost are we now,
shepherdless sheep,
green as goslings, we
turn out after all to be
just one more kind of animal.

4.
So zoo me.
Say on my sign
he thinks he sings
and lives the sky.
Bless me, this zoo
has no cages,
the walls are made of roads,
they feed us day
and give us night to drink
and we linger,
restless sleepers
on the brink of knowing.

5.
In this religion
there is a place
called Somewhere Else,
some manage to go there,
plane or train, coracle, ox,
and never come back.
Some come back with pictures,
leafy descriptions of that place,
tattoos they got there,
recipes for cassoulets,
all the fraudulent evidences
of our senses five
arrayed against the silent
beauty of our mind.

6.
I am the first to admit
to my timidity.
Caution cushions fate—
fact. Girl with prayer book,
boy with roadmap
stumbling through the dark—
we need light to read by
but how to come by it?
I tremble quietly and look away.
Anything can be taken away—
that is the rule of the place
and we learn it as our mother tongue.
Or is there a language with no past tense?

                                                10 August 2020