ROBERT
KELLY

1.
A transparent banner
floats above a peaceful field,
no controversy in the stone.
She runs outside to give
the kids a treat, her hands
full of night and day, water
tumbling in the cleft.
These are my politics.

2.
Grey day, road tree and sky
the same no color. Up to us
to bring religion in again,
light the candle, rouge the lips.

3.
It’s all about money
this government stuff,
we all know that
so let’s think about something
else instead, music, say,
or where I left my wallet
last night, or who was
Robin Hood really, and could
you do all that with an arrow?

4.
The litmus of morning
specifies the mind.
I am identified—the window
recognizes my right to see.
For all I know I could be me. 

5.
Brave as a drunkard
I wave the flag again,
no sign on me, no dream
to clutter my clarity.
Yes, I say, why not?

6.
Don’t be cynical,
there are aunts in the parlor,
Rose and Sarah,
Uncle Seymour, cousin Norman,
they’ve been around a long while
and know what I can only
hope to guess.
Something missing in me,
I can never be them.

7.
Sky gets lighter
gets the earth darker.
8 A.M. if anybody wants to know,
this is a love song,
how could it not be,
you being so beautiful
and I lonely as a monk’s
hand holding his rosary.
One day after another
and each one counts as prayer.

8.
Dear Diana
you spread your arms
over the city,
you let us read
the lines in your palm
as if they show our fate too,
our nature I mean
and the birds fly by
and the rain sweeps your image
but you do not relent,
you keep your arms wide open,
welcoming, offering
the single gesture that will save us all
if we could learn to do it too,
come to my arms, read my hands.

9.
By now my flag
is smudged a little
with beliefs.
Still dim enough
to keep headlights on.
Time is a box
we unpack at our leisure—
call it ‘art’ to be obvious,
or Scarlatti on the cellphone
or the big creek at Wanatanka
pouring into the river,
wide, wide, I seem to sob
seeing it, remembering the sea.

30 November 2020

It said so in the sleep
but who was listening,
who can testify

and who was sleeping?
The radical explanation
is usually the best—

ink blot, gunshot, howl?
She thought she heard an owl
and why not, night,

night has its way with us,
voices and forgetting,
creaking stairs, the moon.

I’m trying to remember,
that’s all, so much gets lost
in the algorithms of lust,

fear, shivering under the sheet.
What did who say when,
twisted branches of context,

not one word remains.
How am I to understand
the sun if I lost the dark,

am I to make do with light
and air and food like
any animal? Animule

my father used to say,
he taught me the haughtiness
of play, play till all the meanings

rub away and leave you free
again, he taught me silence
is the deepest conversation.

29 November 2020

In the oceanography
of time we are the third
island from the core

we stole the land
from the In-digenes
who were always
here before us,
we called them In-dians
because we were from outside
or called them natives
because they were born here
and we haven’t been born yet.

2.
Who are we who stumbled
on this archipelago,
rafting across the great silence,
riding the cosmic rays
desperate to find
a mirror to gaze into
that would shows us our faces,
tell us who we are.

3.
I think we are the fetal mind
of what one day will be
the true humanity, sometimes
you hear our heartbeat
soft in the noise of all that happens.
Christ and Buddha showed the way
to what might yet become—
but we storybook’d the one
and killed the other though on
the third day he rose again
into us ever after, hear him?
or is that just my heart beating? 

4.
So who on earth
are we? Children
maybe, because
we keep asking questions,
good children if we do,
or bad if we think we know the answers
and insist. Be quiet,
little one, we say to ourselves
when we should say Shout
your questions,
the night is waiting for them,
each night a different
answer and we live.

27 November 2020

Imagination is made of trees,
old cars and girls on skis,
bungalows and crocodiles
and every now and then one
word or two that rises from
the sacred compost of sleep,
silence from which we rise,
clumsy flowers with one perfect leaf.

26 November 2020

                                                   for Charlotte

1.
We unfold from the stone

cabbage leaves
crisp curled tight—

slice through the matrix
and find the geode,

slice through what they call
the head and find
our original face.

Animal vegetable mineral.
The distinctions fade,
the face persists.

2.
Once you took some photos
of a head of red cabbage
I’d sliced through the middle
and other slices other angles,
so many faces, diagrams,
maps and measures.

All of them meant us—
a picture anyhow
always means the one
who makes it,
the one who sees it.

3.
Warmer today
still some leaves
on the beech tree,
who will tell in me
what to say
when they fall?

That’s where you come in—
that’s what we have to be
to each other,
                              evergreen, obvious.

4.
You gave me a geode
amethyst grotto,
I gave you a cabbage,
map of my mind.

Proportions vanish,
any line leads anywhere—
mystery of poetry
any word leads everywhere.

5.
I try to give you something of value
but everything I offer
is a shadow of what you give me,
no diamond worthy of your finger.

6.
Light thickens in among the trees
because the branches talk so much
just as I suppose inside our skin
the light fades fast in the commotion
blood and fluids, chemicals at play,
how dark it must be inside us
though that’s where light is born
or at least where it comes from.

7.
The other side of the park
was a mystery to me.
Streets had numbers and no names
but the sea was closer,
the houses separate and small.
I could not understand it—
the other side of anything
is difficult enough, but why
was the other side of Marine Park
so different from us? The sea
is the same, I thought,
and I have sung that to myself
every day, praying that I’m right,
the sea is the same, the sea
is the same. But Malibu is no Oahu,
yet on the rocks of Gloucester
splash the waves of Gerritsen
and maybe I still have hope,
the sea is the same,
maybe the other side
one day will be the same
and we will be there,
cute little houses, a roughcut beach.

8.
As if we give each other
everything that is to come.

We cook the cabbage of course,
turns purple red as it stews,

the images dissolve,
the deep sweetness of the leaf
comes out, teased by our salt.

9.
The sun is bright right now
over where we live—
the humble gift of everything there is.

See, when I woke up I thought
of what it’s like to saw through rock
or slice through cabbage,

how there is a brain
inside everything, me again,
sure that the rock stinks.
But then the pain comes,
of knowing what is thinking
the wound of revelation
changing the face of what we see.

But stone and cabbage,
not a diamond, not a rose?

10.
We interrupt this poem to bring you an important prose from the management. Language is at your service night and day. Language is at the root of every gift we give each other, Language tells a diamond from a chunk of glass, Language tells I love you loud and clear when signs and objects fumble at the door. Trust Language, Language means my heart is yours.

20 November 2020