ROBERT
KELLY

Witches worry us.
The conversation
goes on inside, core,
fruit inside the rind.
Peeled away, the word
comes out, orange
in autumn sunlight, yes.
But we worry.
And why not? The juice
of what we fear
is somehow sweet: ask
any child if they’d rather
meet a wizard or a priest.
Somehow all our many lives
harvest is the time of fruit and hear.

2.
Rheostat, regulate
the flow. I slept
too soundly
to have anything to say.

3.
But dreamt about faux-amis,
words that mean something
other than what we mean
when we pronounce them,
write them down, whisper
them to someone else. False
friends, it means, and maybe
the dream meant them too
but made me think it
was all about grammar
not about grief.

4.
The pallor of things known
compared to the somber
colors of the guessed-at—
children love that, dressing
up means lots of color,
even that blaring white
more shocking than scarlet.
Color what you know
with what you don’t!
Saturate the senses
with loud maybes,
call it dressing up for Halloween.

5.
Sun on Rainday
uh-oh.
Have I betrayed
the calendar again.
Or is it waiting,
my big glass of water,
out and up
beyond the conscious trees?

6.
We can find fear
in the meagerest evidence,
shadow of the witch’s hat
falls across what we are reading,
her cat rubs by our ankles,
her warlock husband growls
from every passing car.
                                                 She herself
is hidden, though, so deep
inside us we will never see.

19 October 2020

Sometimes it’s worth
walking there
with a word on your wrist
like a falcon
you hunt with, ready
to fly off any moment
and seize up there
(where? where
is it hiding
in the broad sky?)
the thing you mean.

The walking matters—
your movement
animates the word.
Muscle has meaning–
to move is to mean.

18 October 2020

Walk through the trees
to know
the burden of identity.
Blue to be a bird,
and then the yellow falls
from sun sky to be green
and you know all the rest.
But not my name.
The names are hard.

2.
Given the color and the shape
you reach for a book.
Given a book you reach for a word.
Given a word you give it to a friend
at least you think you’re giving
but who are you
and who is he, or she, to bear
what you have found?
We silence children
to keep them from telling the truth.

3.
Only late in the morning of life
have I come to understand
the peopleness of trees,
the talkative, the tender,
the fragile, sturdy, enduring.
Qualities we emulate without awareness,
we lean on them, we build
our houses from them,
we burn them to keep warm.
But maybe all this is
part of their plan too.

4.
Identity means plan.
Blueprint. Architect’s
rendering with no
architect in sight.
On site. Picture a tree
before a long flat house
lots of windows in a metal wall.
The tree is a blue spruce,
conical and tall. Now tell
from this information alone
who lives in the house, and who
their true love will be, and how
many children will they have.
Will it be real. Will the crow
deign to perch on so flat a roof.
If I were an artist I would
draw cookies on the lawn to tempt the birds.

5.
I look at all
that I have said
and wonder
where I got it.

For the moment
I don’t wonder
if I have a right
to speak—I’ll

go on till they
stop me, or they,
the others,
stop coming

close enough
to be said.
When I say Listen
to me I mean

Forgive me
for speaking
words from
elsewhere

hungering for you,
you right now,
to listen is the road,
to hear is to be free.

6.
OK, I can’t dance,
not worth a pebble
in your shoe to show me
how to do, no,
I am of the slipper folk,
the shufflers downtown,
the stand here until
that gorgeous Sun comes up.
I tell my beads a thing or two
and wait for that Lady—
does dance always have to be moving?
I remember Yvonne Rainer
leaning standing by a quiet wall
motionless except for all
the little ways a body moves
when it’s at rest. This
was the most dance I ever saw.

7.
So we should really need
a passport to be silent,
enter unspeaking into the
quivering dark from which
all language comes. Passport
to the other side. Signed
by your mother tongue
and witnessed by your true love.
Who knows what you’ll learn
in that country, and when
if ever you come back
what language you’ll be speaking.
You’ll stand in the market
and speak clearly
until someone comes along
who understands what you say,
just like any poet since the start of time.

17 October 2020

= = = = =

All I am is anywhere else.
Mountain crag, no blade
of grass, what do they eat
and the rocks tumble down.
Naked nursemaid flogs a child—
wait, is this religion?

2.
Mars is near the moon tonight,
something red, woke coughing
from an old disease, la vie
humaine. Caterwauling,
is that what I? Images
come to us from asteroids,
they pass and leave us
stuck with what they showed.

3.
Golden pinecone on the Pantheon,
so who is God when you say the word?
Alphabets all over us, yet hard
to pronounce the stone,
the creep of glaciers
past the sleeping bears.
The child starts crying
and the nursemaid stops.

4.
You see, old friend, hold
firmly to what you don’t quite know,
leap towards the unknown
but do it quietly, at home,
in the dark. You can get
anywhere from here.
Sometimes music helps,
the news from Mozart,
listen. Tender moss
you think his name must mean
when you first hear it
but then comes the slow
movement of the ninth concerto
and a whole new century
falls into your hands.
There is no one in the music
ever, only you.

5.
Pay for the privilege
we say, barbers and harlots,
cowboys and clerks.
Everybody is part of the act.
My friends are in Philadelphia now,
for instance, they have their reasons,
rivers, children, universities,
maybe even owls in the park.
A city is naught without owls.

6.
Not trying to be clever,
just trying to walk the boulevard
from the museum to the cathedral
and study the nature of God again,
between what God has made
and what we have made of Him.
If him is the right word
but let it pass for now,
I have so many mistakes to correct
and the trees along the way
are already losing their leaves.

7.
Why are they allowed
to show such things,
crumbling mountain,
starving bear? Don’t we know
that images last forever
and what we see becomes us,
terror tattoo of things seen?
I wake between nowhen
and nowhen else
to write down what they told
my eyes, and sleep showed more,
now I have to wash the images
with words so that you know
but are not hurt by what you know.

8.
I said the nurse had stopped,
I mean the child whimpered
his way back to sleep
through the broken alphabet
which is all we have left
of how the world was made.

4 October 2020

1.
Pillow filled with
empty blue bottles
clank as you tread
the walkways of sleep.
Who is your farmer,
who harries your corn?

2.
The colors do it
by themselves,
the autumning. Can
the word come from avis,
when the leaves
fly away like birds.

3.
Easy cry New!
when the oldest
thing in the world
is new every day–
Pound told us that,
he heard it in China
where he never was—
is that new enough?

4.
New enough to be green still?
Early October
the dreams come thick
and waking is a compromise.

5.
Follow the dream
dreams don’t
know how to lie
or tell the truth.
They tell and tell
till you are told.
Cling to the banisters
of sleep until, until, until…

6.
Windows shut,
heat turned on,
slept ill.
The softest
things we know
are full of bones.
I repeat, nothing is easy.
Dawn is a priest
looks at me severely—
every window is a church.

7.
Catenary—the way
a cable swoops,
how a straight line
behaves in the real world,
o pallid geometers.
The shortest distance
is always around some corner.
Lie on your side,
listen to your blood
talk into the pillow.
The pillow will remember, be careful who you sleep beside,
morning always asks hard questions.

8.
I mean we eat the kale
but do not know the farmer.
We see the lake but I don’t swim.
See the difference? What if
the air was pure oxygen,
what would we see growing then?
We need the dark, the quiet one
with tender eyes who tells us No.

3 October 2020