ROBERT
KELLY

1.
Empty head a harp
still, lets
the wind of what
happens sing.

2.
Turns out everything
is an answer.
Now locate the question.
This is religion.

3.
Stood by the stream
across the street just
a few moments when
someone also stopped
and we talked. It seemed
too natural, made me wonder
am I part of what flows?

4.
I keep telling my friends
Don’t think. Let it
think you. Aristotle
frowns at me but Aquinas understands.

5.
Once there was another country
and we all came from there.
It wasn’t so long ago but we forget
and make up long stories about
imaginary places like England,
Italy, China, Ireland, Africa.
Maybe it helps us put up
with where we think we are.

6.
Just as in one of those places
the harp sings by itself.
Or to put it a southern way
the ancestors sing through us.
Either way, the song
comes to meet us
and we call it morning.
14.X.21

under glass
the way the mind
spreads out
what it has seen.

2.
So much left to say,
it needs an anthology of mornings
to get even part of the message across.

3.
Across the Great Divide
twixt thee and me.
How’s that for music
when you weren’t looking?

4.
It is a kind of rapture,
silent, that then eases
into speech. Not many
but few as they are
more than enough.

5.
When you look into a mirror
you condemn yourself to a journey.
It begins and begins
before you know it
you’re on the road,
no grammar to guide you.

6.
Certain Irish monks
were banished from empty Iceland
when the Vikings arrived.
They traveled ever further west,
came to America, said
We will leave this land in peace.

7.
That’s the nice part of the story.
After that you don’t much want
your children to hear. But they must,
they must understand
what you have done. We have done.

8.
When you have a chance
lift the glass carefully,
let the musty smell out
and maybe a bird or two,
crow if you’re lucky.
Now let the knowledge
rest a while in light and air,
you go on about your business
while it breathes.

9.
That’s how to deal with the truth,
let it say itself in all its ways.
Getting light out now,
someone taking off their shirt.

10.
We must say it
say it again
in the current state
of luggage, o language
is the final law,
it means what we say.

15 October 2021

The empty air
was inside him now
and sleep a half-
remembered folk song
from a far-off tribe,
the mysterious Awake.

2.
What to do
with all this music?
Hang by a thread
then cut the thread?

3.
Nyet. No good.
The dark no comfort.
The glass teeters on the edge.
Yesterday afternoon
a plate fell and did not break.
Hold onto that.
Still hope in the hands.

4.
Sleep elusive maiden
in this wood with so few trees,
all her names
shadows of the still unfallen leaves.

5.
We can close our eyes
but not our ears.
But he has eyes in the mind
he cannot close.
Listen to the dark, then,
brother, the sneers of sleep.

11 October 2021

The mist has lifted.
Only in the highest leaves
lingers. The registers
of human speech
define our atmosphere.

2.
We understand the speaker
better when we see the kind of tree
that grows inside.

3.
Eager for conviction,
she listens with her whole body,
reminds us of a stream,
freshet from the hills
washing her with words.

4.
But who is speaking?
There’s a little book of mine
came out only in German
called Wer spricht?, means
Who is Speaking. Still want to know.

5.
These episodes of understanding
come like monarch butterflies,
dozens of them
and then none,
while they’re off
multiplying in Mexico.

6.
Get it straight:
the pool cue
is not a fountain pen.
It doesn’t mean a thing
if it doesn’t leave a trace.

7.
And so we met
off Harvard Square,
brunch at the Basque restaurant
and talked high poesy.
It was almost like being alive
but not quite. But I could see
the shores of pure Being
over the messy waves of chat.

8.
So close now
to Another Thing.
What could it be
that sings to me.
Sometimes it takes
the form of pain,
leg or shoulder,
wrist or brow,
sense works hard
to music us
and sometimes it hurts.
Sometimes you wake up in the dark.

9.
Remember how we started,
pebble on a beach,
changes color when it’s wet.
Slips into any pocket,
any ear can hear this word.

7 October 2021

Four blocks of un-masoned stone, rough-quarried limestone, oblong, huge, waiting for language’s child’s hand to play with them into meaningful array,

or just play.

One stands
three lie.

Another stands,
an upright couple,
a couple lying down.

Marry me
stone keeps saying,
marry me, wed me
back into earth

for I weary sometimes
of sunlight’s games,
sleep with me.

Are the down two
supine or prone?
Hard to tell
when all sides are the same,

hard to tell as music—
is music face down when we hear it
or staring up at us
eyes wide open
saying Marry me
over and over?

Now all four are standing,
Stone Age temple
you can her them laughing
at our innocent religions

when all they ever have to do
is stand there.
Or lie down
as before,

I’d call them prone,
hiding their faces
from us if they could,
but they forget:
stone is all face.

Nothing hid.
Are they on a meadow
or a hilltop?
You decide,
you’re the one who sees them now,
I’m just trying to remember.

And does it even matter
how big they are,
I see freight-cars
you see cardboard
little boxes, cookies
could come in them,
or a dozen pencils
(remember them?
wooden stocks with words in them)

what does size matter
except to the patient earth
that maybe vaguely yearns
to have its children back again.

You never know
with blocks of rock,
Stonehenge laughing at us
for five thousand years,
and in the Anatolian tepes
older stones are coming back,
shouldering their hills aside,
calling out for human help
to be out here again with us.

But who are we
that stone should care?

Four blocks to play with
and you’ll never finish,

permutations of position,
and the way their shadows
join and part and sway
all through the livelong day,

maybe shadow music
is enough to see,
how identical objects
cast so many different shapes.

Abashed by truth
we stand around
staring at the stones,
wait for sunrise or solstice
or anything we could link
with what we think

or think the stones are doing.
What do stones do?

But I too want to see them standing,
standing or lying,
thick in daylight, real,
teach me real!

I want to be alone with them,
just me and them
and their hill or meadow
or jungle or whatever,
what do I know
of where stones live?

Just let me be alone with them
an hour, or even less,
long enough to catch my breath,
steep hill, wide meadow,
and stand there,
try to be as still as they are
and try to mean as much
as a man can of what they mean.

6 October 2021