ROBERT
KELLY

From a six mile tunnel under the mountains
it happened to the wide open plain.
The trees skipped the way they do
to dodge the hurtling machines.
For a lovely morning moment
everything was just as it is.

2.
She remembered that
from her place on the balcony
you could see only a little of her
through the lattice under the poppies
(Eschscholzia californica), boxes
of cereals on the ledge
peace offerings to the birds.
She was busily remembering
a whole other continent
sometimes it’s amazing
to think one is actually here.
When two white-throated sparrows
(o how sad their song can be!)
flew away she went back to her book.

3.
Back in France the trees calmed down,
the road had the look of noontime,
empty, everywhere somewhere else.
How small we animals really are
compared to what is actually there—
you could feel the quiet sun
hinting gently something like that,
o so many reminders needed
and every step a road of its own.

4.
When the rain began
she shook the first drops
off the page she had forgotten
to keep reading, she hurried
inside and left the flowers to the rain,
such things need such things.
She shook her hair dry
and went to the fridge
where the past was stored
mostly in glass—nobody
trusts plastic anymore.
I really was there once,
she thinks, I really saw
the tunnel end and the world
come back the way it should always be,
just there, calm, leaving it
to me to do all the being,
moving around. Nothing
caught her fancy in the cold.
She shut the door—better
to go hungry than blunt
the keen arrow of human appetite
by eating something not desired
just because it’s there.
She wishes it would stop raining
so she could go sparrowing again.

5.
Less done less to regret
she remembered an old nun
saying that. Outside
a car went by hooting its
boy noise out its windows
never mind the rain.
Never mind, those things pass by.
She watched the wall, aware
that it was telling her
a little bit about what she
didn’t want to think about—
one more reminder!

OK, Wall, what happened in France?

You loved everything you saw
but wanted something else.
It cost so much just to get here
where you began, just to see
me again, your brand-new wall
that knows all the secrets of
every room you ever lived in,
what one wall knows, another
can repeat—that is the fact
of walls that humans build,
one wall knows all.

6.
That’s all about you
she cried almost angry
at the plaster, but
what about me?

Are you so different
from me? said the wall,
don’t you know you are
everywhere you have ever been,
that tunnel under the Vosges
debouches I think the word is
right into your living room,
right here, city, actual, holy, blessed.

O wall I’m sorry
I know you mean well,
or mean wall,
whichever is truer, better,
but what am I after,
why does the book end
and leave me here alone,
where do sparrows go
when they don’t see me?

I pray for you, said the wall,
because I only know
what you know,
I am your wall, plus all walls,
when they first built walls
ten thousand years ago in Turkey
they said their own prayers
so that all walls should be
a little bit like gods,
holding and protecting
and even remembering—
but no more. A wall
doesn’t know the future—
if it did it could not stand.
But I can pray, and do,
and keep the thieves away.

7.
But maybe she wanted the thief,
it takes a thief
to show you the worth
of what you have.
What they want to steal
is where I should begin
she thought. The rain stopped,
so did a bus at the corner,
she went onto the balcony,

there is clarity
even in not knowing,
knowing, knowing,
the sparrow said.
Maybe just trying to know
is a kind of knowing
and maybe knowing is enough.

10 September 2020

Outside the breeze
makes tree leaves
dance wild shadows
of your future wife.

You can learn almost
everything from them,
the moves, the play
of light and shade.

You have come here
for this, your rite
of passage from artifice
to actual.

She dances
for you, all of them do.

13 September 2020

The rooms
that enter us
and stay.

We know the doors of them
polished by dream,
the sunlight or the shallows
in each room, bedspread
table Monet print on the wall,
the old-fashioned telephone,
the empty vase.
Springtime
seldom comes,
no one speaks Latin,
the bathroom always far away.

Facts torture with images.
Room after room.

2.
And sure enough
when you wake up
you’re in yet another,

and this room too,
mainland or island,
Anglophone or otherwise,
will play its role
in some night opera
from which you can barely
awaken, like now,
into the freshness of the familiar.

3.
Nothing leaves us.
There is nowhere
for it to go. no border
it can cross to flee
the immensity of here.

4.
Warm sticky danish
coffee in a paper cup
and late to work.
The Apollo gallery in the Louvre.
Melville’s writing desk,
dentist’s office, closet
on Brown Street with the black
seal fur soft inside it.

There is no distance.
And difference is only
a taste on the tongue,
and that too soon fades.

13 September 2020

What does a tree
think of grammar?
Grammar is our grain
I guess, subjective,
objective, genitive,
ablative, conditional.
future perfect, past.
The tree knows all that
in one moment, one
glimpse of bare wood
tells more than books could,
And there is a winter
in language too,
when the leaves fall away
but the meaning stays.

12 September 2020

They looked like strangers
so we called them friends,
had them sit down, fed them
milk and blueberry bread,
no meat yet, not sure what
their religion. And they ate.
They called the bread muffins
and the little fruit inside
they called huckleberries
so we knew we had nothing to fear.

2.
She kept looking back
as she ran ahead,
made sure we were following
and we were, though she’d
stop sometimes so we slower
could come close to catching
up with her, then she’d run on
and we’d follow. We follow.
Every now and then
she gives us a breather
and then again run on, o
that look on her face
as she looks back over her
right shoulder and runs on.

3.
And so it’s never clear
if we are the guests or the hosts.
Food changes hands. People
run and stop. We go indoors,
we settle on sofas, a phone rings
and we’re off again, she looks back
to make sure we follow.
What would happen if we didn’t,
if we just stood still,
or sat there on the couch,
nibbling, parsing the shadows?

4.
I feel ashamed for even asking.
She is to be followed.
They are to be fed.
Somehow it coheres
and we are where we are
at any given moment home.
This is not wisdom,
this is fact. Now calculate
the distance between.
She’s looking back at us again,
I could almost swear she’s smiling.

12 September 2020