ROBERT
KELLY

PSALM
for J.N.

The Lord is my shepherd
he sang and the stone listened

bite marks on though leek leaf
pilgrim disguised as a jogger

children skillfully play
a game they don’t understand,

and I would be his sheep
her pet tiger the autumn moon

cover your heads dear friends
harvest soon, too soon to plant.

2.
Next year’s alliums already
sting my eyes, I need
the mead of music, parched
with truth, need the holy
silence only music brings,

stone on your doorstep, door,
threshold, liminal, margin,
pages of the book to be,
Adonai rohi it sounded like,
his young voice suddenly old.
Words age us, did I even know
I wanted to be a sheep, a ram
even mighty with curved horns,
would I eat grass? But what is
this tumult around me, a town,
nation sick with fun at midnight,
who really is the moon?

5 October 2022

At a certain moment
it had been decided in him
that the world was real
in just the way he was,
if he was, aware and feeling
and thinking about everything
and wanting and not wanting
and forever being there.
He wanted to be there forever
so took lessons from the stone,
not just vast arching synclines
or mountains on the horizon
but from pebbles on the path,
did research among the trees,
grasslands of the 40th parallel,
Buzzards Bay and Bosporus but
most of all the sea he could see
from the cloud he also visited,
sleep or waking, one mind for all.

4 October 2022

Hands you can shake off
but words stick
the rest of your life.

2.X.22, lune

Classrooms on the moon
where young poets learn
meaningful dreaming

and semiotic touch–
                                          which
parts of their own body
they should listen to
most keenly,
                           and which
to keep at a respectful
distance, mere ancestry
snoring way inside.

In those pale lunar chambers
they learn that urgent skill:
to speak without assertion,
hum and sing and watch the sky
and let the reader drive.

                                                       1 October 2022