ROBERT
KELLY

1.
Among the river gods
we revere one on the other side,
hair in the eye,
slothful argument.
We know her name
and that eases our debate,
we saw her ride from the shallows
and in some glory ascend
into the forest of all the rest of us.

2.
Is the will free,
is free will ever so,
is there a willer in us
all clean and unimpeded?
That’s what we had to solve
in the sanhedrin of the dream
all night long.

3.
Better, I thought,
to watch her
as long as she was visible
among the woodlots,
unmistakable shimmer of her going.
No, the will is not free yet.

4.
Consider the shale beds
behind your house,
little cliff, a man could fall
and still survive, maybe hurt
a bone or two on that descent.
How each century left its stone
identity for the next to cover
and nice fresh living dirt
fills the crannies with grass
and soon flowers. Earth
tries to help us understand the will.

5.
Those who dare to sleep
athwart or across the meridians
rather than aligned with the poles
endure fierce dreams.
Your choice, dear friend.
The howl still hurts my head.

6.
Texts were being offered
burnt with reverence
on an altar some ways ahead.
A friend took one of mine
and hurried on. I stood,
feeling weak, my work done,
in the woods. I perched
on a stool by the path, knew
something had begun.
In monasteries they call it the retreat.

7.
The postcard said
You are always halfway home.
But where is she
or he who wrote it
and why no signature,
just a picture of the river,
Danube I guess,
but east of Budapest.

8.
So where had my will gone,
Voluntas mea, when I needed
her so badly in the woods,
I mean the woods on this side,
not across the river.
These trees, the exact
inscription of their bare
branches on the ever-patient sky,
where is she when I need her well,
I read what things are saying
but till she comes close
I cannot speak a word.
Or so it seems. I clutch
the tree trunk and call again.
And this too is a word, isn’t it?

9.
So be careful where you wake
after you’ve been sleeping.
The will wanders, daylight
wields confusions of its own.
If you sleep on your back
who is that you spot on the ceiling?
If you sleep on your side
what is that on which you turn your back?
Nothing’s easy, the machine
keeps running, you start to remember.
And maybe your pillow
still has news for you.

14 January 2021

The rain was still falling but the hen went on pecking at her concerns along the edge of the road. A white bird, ashen really, vigorous and wet. I’m not sure than I’m not one of those people who expect other people to do their chores for them, looking at the rain and the wet road, it was hard to be sure. The writing table then, a right old antique, had fleurs-de-lys in yellow wood inlaid into the slightly darker phillipine mahogany. Colors!

Letters don’t write themselves, I mean, and the woman is waiting down in that ridiculous city for some word from me—not a reply, how can one “reply” to affection, tenderness. Something has to be said. I’m sure you’ve noticed how the heating coil on a hotplate or electric range turns always to the right, as if a left-trophic turn would suck the natural heat out of meat or root and leave it instead a frigid corpse-white on a pan too old to touch. I mean too cold—but you know that: see, I almost left it for you to discover, be my corrector.

Remember, there is some tropical fruit or gourd which, hollowed out and dried, can be pierced here and there with holes and become an ocarina, that ‘little goose’ fluty thing ovally round and nestles in the palm of the hand, hooty-hoot the soft sound of it played. Now is the song inherent in the gourd, and all our native crafts exist to let it out? Ask this about everything.

By now the chicken is out of sight, hidden in the bushes or maybe flown away. Can chickens still fly? If not, is it Darwin or the farmer’s knife responsible for their grounding? Look what happened to penguins, and nobody even eats them. Can chickens even swim?
It is at moments like this that one says to oneself, or I say, my God, the road is empty, empty. What can I tell the woman in Belem? A little song: If you care / why are you there? Dangerous. One thing I’ve learned: we are all where we should be. Going was our first mistake.

I hope the fox didn’t get the hen. Time for music. I turn on the radio on the table, internet, set for the Catholic station in Vienna plays classical music 24/7, tossing little maxims and bon-mots between the selections, but all in German so they don’t break in to the solemn worship music is, if you don’t mind my saying so. Listen if you like.
But I have to write something. Language demands hat of her children—hear a word, say a word. That’s the rule. Why is she even in Brazil? Crocodiles, and river dolphins that come up on land at midnight to court young women, so I’ve been told. Or is that another city? There are so many. So little empty spaces left for me and the chicken. And the fox. So maybe I’ll tell her that: Dear friend, there is an empty road between our houses, bending always to the right, it will bring us together as the world turns. There. That doesn’t make much sense but at least it’s written. Maybe the sense comes later, grows out of the worlds, like ordinary flowers when this winter is over.

13 January 2021

1.
Wrap me in colors
for I would see
myself seen
as I am, parceled
by sunlight
into districts
of desire, marshes
of dream,
blue seas of renewal.
For colors tell
all, keep no secrets,
yellow sapphire,
blood-brown amber
with the sun
still in it, so many
years, the tiny
bright sky in the heart
of the diamond,
mother’s ring,
everything reminds.

2.
Even now someone is writing
a note to me from a distant city:
“I dreamt great sheets of green,
not grass, not any special thing,
just sheets of color. So I knew
right then that I was you.”

3.
These things are permanent.
Colors fade but color never does.
Reach out and take what you need,
ivory of your steady hand.

4.
In the hills some men are saying
prayers to help the world go round,
and with their words or sounds
or brains or breaths, who knows,
they fumble beads with their thumbs,
little ones in lapis, broad in bone.

5.
Everything we say
has color too.
Or hear someone remark,
or just the weather
sounding its way
unceasingly our own.
On these grey winter days
open the dictionary,
it will be our crayon box enough.

11 January 2021

1.
That day at last again
the showing.
Now we examine, evaluate,
what has come to be shown,
come to be seen.

2.
I guess they used the gold
to feed and take care of
the Child and themselves.
The incense I imagine they burned,
watching the smoke drift off
the way prayers do,
turning into the sky.
What did they do with the myrrh? 

3.
Now it’s time to flee to Egypt,
the big country called
the rest of the year.
Big river, stone buildings,
statues of improbable gods
so strange they must be real.
Breakfast lunch and supper.
One way streets.

4.
I don’t want to be relevant
I want to be right.
Slowly what we have learned
turns into summer.
All the children are grown up,
at this distance hard to tell
one from another.
We’re all adults now,
we are who we are.
That is what summer means.

5.
And that’s why so many years in Egypt,
so many months from now
to solstice, when the sun
comes in the front door.
He whispered this to me
before he went away.

6 January 2021

The year begins to speak to me
quietly as my own breath—
have I confused myself
with what’s around me?
Am I just the time of things again?
Whatever the word is,
the year is speaking.
Young winter, mild sky.
Everything is prophecy.

2.
I begin to feel again
like the self you know.
And I am here for you,
so at least I have shown
up for work on time—
that’s the good kind of year.

3.
He swept away liturgy
he rolled away the stone.
Come in and sit down
in the dark and know your mind
he said and then come out again
and make the world happy
one by one.

4.
I think of that now,
the calm of the inner room
where we learn to be
and do something useful
with our being. And what
a wonder is a simple door.

5.
Mystery is a white tree
up the road,
a road is a riddle.
So many friends have
walked into the sky,
amazing how their voices linger
or I feel them almost at my fingertips.
Tree on a hill,
sky hidden in the sky.

6.
If you’re so smart, she said,
you could dance in your dreams
where feet are nimble
and syllables count themselves
up and down the famous steps
the Viennese set such store on.
By now she’s lost me, I’m stuck
yet again trying to find a name.
A name not mine. Or not mine yet.

7.
When it comes
it will sound at first
like language
then as you listen longer
it will seem music
and finally silence.
But your hands feel
as if there’s something
firm and clean in them,
an oval lapis perhaps
or a flower bulb but
you look down and they’re empty.
But the word has been spoken.

2 January 2021