ROBERT
KELLY

We went to church
and got long strips of palm,
dry, yellowish, hard
to imagine greening on a tree.
At home we’d make
two brief lengthwise slits
in a longer piece and weave
a shorter through it: a cross.
This palm cross always made us glad
strange gladness considering
the tortured death it symbolized,
but who were we to question
long tradition of celebration,
so the palm cross stayed up,
pinned to the wall or stuck
into a mirror frame, a cross
to bless our house this year,
a small holy thing, maybe
six or seven inches tall.

2.
We did all this just because
we were Catholics, or Irish,
all the people in the neighborhood—
from Sicily, Naples, Calabria—
did it too.
                     Who knows
why we do what we do.
And where did crosses come from
anyhow? Dry scholars claim
we wear them round our necks because
Viking ancestors worshipped Thor
and wore his double-headed hammer
tiny round their necks.
Is that the hammer that once
nailed Christ to His cross?
It hurts me to think of what we do
to those who love us,
love us enough to come talk to us.

4.
My fingertips still can feel
the dry tough smooth
of the little palm cross,
months later when we took it down,
stuck it in a prayer book.
bookmark, eternal souvenir
of what we don’t understand,
why we do what we do,
why we are who we are.

28 March 2021

Bone me. Unfeather my fears.
I was a mountain before you
and I let everyone climb,
my springs sprang high,
sluiced down into your dry fields.

2.
Was that me singing? No,
it was you in all your windows
glad of my rain. I admit
you learned the song from me
but you sang better:

There was
a woman walking
on the road
in wet clothes
though the rain
stopped long ago,
long ago, some
water lasts forever.

You must have liked the song
you sang so well.

3.
Remember the Pyrenees
when we first began,
pink chalk dust all over your hands
and three flat stones
to hold the kettle over
the meanest fire charcoal ever set
and yet we drank that tea
lime leaves and honey
and an eagle feather fallen in the pot.

4.
I shaped you,
I hope you know that—
grow a little more this way,
a little less that.
I was the Donatello of your dreams
and when you woke
we both were complete.

5.
When I get around to it
tell me the truth,
how long we lingered
in such crowded markets
until there were
just two of us left, and I
bossy as usual called
one of them you and one of them me.

The crowd was gone,
the stalls were empty,
windows all shattered in the storm.
We’re used to ruins
(we live in them, remnants
of an earlier reality,
we still stumble on their bricks)
used to ruins so in the collapse
of this economy felt right at home.
That was before you decided
to become a mountain too.

6.
Who was that wet woman?
I can hear your curiosity.
She was your missing sister Sarah,
the one who believes in religion,
no day without its baptism,
I tried to stop her for a chat,
a sweet tisane, a Turkish cigarette
but no, she was late for vespers
or a seder or some such thing,
left me with a little pamphlet,
its pages all stuck together from the wet,
something about triangles, gods, hearts.

7.
Now I’ve lost track
of all the times I’ve told
and you believed
enough to make it true.

And you told back to me
a reasonable commonwealth
not too close but still
this side of the moon.
Every day turns out to be Election Day—
and why not? All we ever have to do
is choose. I still have
that eagle feather, dry and stiff,
stuck between the pages,
an excellent bookmark it makes
but I’m not sure which book.

26 March 2021

The white wall
followed us
as we walked
up into the hills,
we came to a chapel
where some sort of priest
was chopping dead branches
so you took it into your head
to go to confession to him
and you began.
                                   The wall
looked on. I tried
not to overhear
what you took to be your sins,
I know what I know
and don’t need your innocent fantasies.
When you stopped mumbling
the priest mumbled something in turn,
in some other language.
Then he said what sounded like
he had never seen an American on his knees before,
then he went back to chopping wood
and the wall moved forward,
uphill still, and we followed,
anxious to read our shadows
moving on it as we walked.

2.
A wall is a friendly comrade,
doesn’t need food, holds tight
to all the light it can, a white
wall especially. You and I were
lucky to have one for a friend.
We thought at first that it
was with us, then realized
after a few miles that we
were with it, it guided us
uphill by the gleaming
glamor of its emptiness.

3.
We were at the hilltop now,
a few boulders scattered about,
evidence some glacier past
had shaped this land. Xenoliths
you remarked, foreign stones
I understood. The wall rested.
I wanted to know why
you had told the priest so much
you never told me, did you want
me just to overhear so as not
to have to respond? No, you said,
I was talking to the wall, wanted
our wall to know the company it’s keeping.
But don’t you know, I said,
a wall knows everything?
Every person near a wall
leaves his full history in it.

4.
You doubted that. I admit
my statement was extreme—
no flowers and no birds,
no pretty people gamboling on imagined lawns,
just the sense of things sinks in,
the sense of us, Bach’s music
deep in the walls of that Leipzig church.
Speaking of priests.

5.
I suppose I was right.
I suppose the wall would have stopped me
if I said wrong—
A wall is a most truthful friend,
couldn’t even lie if it tried.
And it doesn’t try. So you and I
are left with our xenoliths and the sky
while the wall breathes patiently
alongside. It will rain soon,
I think, please, wall, take us home.

6.
Not so fast—rain loves you too
the wall explained. And think
how I will glisten as
rain sleeks me down!
You haven’t even heard
the question yet—
how will you know it
when the answer comes?
Stay here with the sky,
stay here with me,
a wall is the only real thing
humans ever made,
a silence in the endless song,
a comma in the unending sentence–
forgive my eloquence,
it’s all I have.

7.
So we remained.
It rained, and we remembered.
The wall indeed was lovely
in shimmering, awash with downpour.
We kept to the lee side of the wall
that kept us wet but not drenched,
The wall itself had some
colloquy with the wind,
the way they do, arguing,
the wind toying gladly angry
with each new obstacle
while we shivered.
You were glad
you had gone to confession.
I wished I had some sins to confess—
I thought about what sins
I would have liked to have committed
until the rain stopped.
We shook our clothes, tried
to act normal, followed the wall
downhill this time, the wall
speaking to us of a river,
a river that was to come.

24 March 2021