ROBERT
KELLY

The loveliest thing about writing
is you can’t tell where it’s going.
Even if you have your last line
firmly in mind, you can’t control
what the words get up to
along the way. Something always comes to mind between one word and the next, and after
every word a gap like a river–
who knows what they speak
over there, with that weird
flag flapping on a mound
you have no binoculars to help.

No, you have to cross the gap
all by yourself, bark out a word
and hold till it ferries you over
and dumps you in silence
halfway there so you have to
Flounder out and come ashore,
the mighty river was a trickle,
that flag a flutter in magnolia.

You’ve found the new word now
and weary though you may be
it will carry you to the next,
the next, the next. That’s all
I know about getting there.

10 April 2023

Then it began again,
the truth comes by weeks,
that’s what work is for,
the numbers press
0ur tender skin.

2.
But who is talking,
who dares to have
opinions about seven
or thirteen or nine
or even one? Is one
even a number or just
what is? We used to love
cowboy music, ‘cause cowboys
have no weeks or weekdays,
they just have cows, cowday
every day keeps numbers at bay
till a solitary horseman
herds them home.

3.
I think of what such music said,
but I haven’t heard it for years
and I haven’t even seen a cow
since two days ago, soft brown
Jersey, in the Churchtown barn,

4
In fact you saw the cow, whole
barn full of them, you told me, I took your word for it.
O Monday is a prairie spread
deep into a shimmering horizon
and I woke with no numbers
in my head at all but only
now they come toppling in,
bales of hay, tumbleweed.

10 April 2023

And so we stood
alone in the rain
on the broad piazza
in front of the temple,
bronze horses on the roof.
Though we were married
it married us again
to be there, the Adriatic
lapping at the stone,
we couldn’t hear tt
but we could feel it,
the way you hear music
when somebody says Bach.
Then we went back
to the suburbs, friend’s house,
human insistence on the small.
Thank God for little things,
Tiny communion wafer—
we call it Bread
and see in the mind’s eye
a great brown loaf
that feeds our billions
if we consent to eat.

Suburbs like Old Mill in Brooklyn,
I was shocked, little canal, scattered brick cottages
in empty fields—my childhood suddenly was all around me
and speaking Italian too.
Though not the dialects I heard,
chopped off vowels of Sicilian,
but the water smelled the same.

2.
So why does anybody get married?
Because a place is most real
when you’re together. Shades
deeper, bricks firmer, rain
refreshing, all the playful
teasing of the actual.
Of course it has to be Venice,
the clitoris of Europe,
there in the crowds before
San Marco or the white beauty
of Santa Maria della Salute
where we stood all alone
on the stone that holds the sea.

Of course be married–
how else can you know
what’s really there
without another self to tell you?

3.
Grey but no rain
here today
and mild enough
to coax the forsythia
I need for Friday,
my mother’s birthday.

Venice is just a beautiful
excuse for talking
about marriage,
talking always about love.
It is, I suddenly remember,
the city solemnly married the sea
in the days of the Doges.
And now it’s for us to do it,
hand in hand on the marble prow
we do what we can,
the purest way we can, heal
the world by being in it together.

5 April 2023

LESSON PLAN

Let me tell you what to do.
I speak with confidence
because I don’t know
anything but the sound of words.
Music is enough for both of us.

2.
Or if you doubt my bona fides
(rhymes with Fridays as we say
those lucky days in Brooklyn)
((lucky: work is done, lust is in))
then try to honor ancestry:
I was born of humans on planet Earth.

3.
As I was saying—
This is what you have to do:
Take every word you hear
as gospel truth.
Accept it, smile, take
down another book and open it.
Every religion says the same:
It’s all up to you.

4.
But we were speaking of
what I want to tell you,
instructions that should last you
all the way to the end of today
when the golden sun sinks
beneath the greening horizon
and another truth comes along,
just as true but much darker,
rub your hands and sing along.

5.
There, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you: sing along,
muzzle your skeptic twitches
and sing along with what comes.
Don’t make me say it all again,
sing along, sing along,
it’s the magic way of listening.

4 April 2023

A cup is reverence
taken to the lip.
Full or less or empty even
it is a tiny sacrament of love
accepting love, cold glass
or hot porcelain, the calm
vocabulary of ecstasy.

3 April 2023