ROBERT
KELLY

How many months in a cloud?                                                Over Geneva I counted summer, in Glendale calculated
winter from the freeway.
I still don’t know.

The sky today hazy but no cloud,
at least none you can count
unless you stop at One.
Weather confuses arithmetic–
I learned that as a kid
on snowy days in school
when all the numbers fade away.
O give me algebra instead
where it’s all inside!
where nothing needs counting
and all the months are just now.

26 October 2022

I could pretend to be
someone else for a while,
a staircase in Venice
or a swingset in the park.
Still, still, beneath the going,
the flowing through the air
and come back again.
Or I could be a racing car
idling at the side of an ordinary
road, afraid to rev and run,
fear I might not get there
wherever racers go. Afraid
to say any more. Pretending
is worse than advertising,
crueler than credit cards.
I can’t even pretend anymore
though the steps of Santa Maria
are very white and very clean.

25 October 2022

Rapture
and things like that
walking by the river
wanting to be it
or at least be in it, part
of its enterprise
of coming from something real
and going somewhere else,
you yearn for that,
you’re up to your ankles already
then step back ashore,
singing, yes, song
takes you a long way,
the urgent articulate muscles
of your body learn from
or maybe they teach the river
how to move and what it means
to move, maybe your body,
shoulders and hips and arms
swung out before you
is the real instructor
the obedient geology of earth
studies to emulate, one day
maybe it will become.
But all your religions
and all your desires
conspire to persuade you
it’s the other way round.
We learn from rivers,
we listen to stone.
You take two more steps
up the bank, the berm,
words, rocks, you sit down
on a stone wait and watch
it all go on without you.
But you are with it as it goes.
Sitting still right here
will take you everywhere.

24 October 2022

visiting a friend
there for the yachts
I never saw, the sea
was near but somehow
belonged to the Navy
and the wealthy. Ah well,
things do. But there
I saw a tree, no names
please, tall enough
to dwarf his house,
dark like locust, and this
seemed a friend from home.
No, I’m not a good traveler,
yes, I’m always on the way home.

2.
But the tree
stays in mind
strange emblem
of a seaside town,
school for sailors
and their tailors,
we are who we are
by the way we dress,
open the buttons
one by one.

3.
And the tree had none
of course, what am I
doing here, drive to Baltimore
where at least there are streets,
department stores, race tracks
all kinds of things I don’t’ need
and don’t want but love
to see all round me, Why am I
talking about me again,
this is supposed to be tree.

4.
Once I was lonely
once I was free,
men all around
and no woman for me.
You think it’s me
moaning on again but no,
it was the tree said that.
And for forty years I’ve wondered
what is a wife for a tree?

5.
I asked the preacher
you can guess what he said: as man cometh forth from woman
so cometh tree from the earth,
yea, earth is mother and bride.

6.
So what has all this to do
with Annapolis,
and who was this Anna
the city borrows the name of.
Not sure. Ask yourself
the next time you’re lonely,
is it the place’s fault,
are there places where
it is not good to be alone.

23 October 2022

Why aren’t you in church
the bird demanded.
—I am, I am, can’t you see
the trees all round me?
—I thought people needed
churches that talked.
—We do, I do, just listen
to those sermoning leaves.

23.X.22