ROBERT
KELLY

I grew up near Floyd Bennet field
in Brooklyn, just military then
so I never got to stand in it.
All the airports I have known
from Idlewild a little older
to Bagdogra where the tigers roar
nothing prepared me for the sky
now that I am alone in it,
standing on earth, maybe,
but all I can see is that blue
gulping the earth up into
its glorious vacancy. A critic
would explain I mean
a clueless sky over Cedar Hill
and otherwise I’m just
showing off as usual, using
a thousand words where one
yawn or sob wold do the job.
Do the trick, he’d say, but it is
no trick, it is a long slow sigh,
the mind you hear in a cathedral
or imagine you would if you
dared to go to such places.
I just mean for half an hour
I’m alone with the sky —
the sky doesn’t seem to mind.

11 May 2023

1.
Precision. A lens.
High magnification
smaller field of vision.
To see birds better.
Buy binoculars. Recall
human history of optics.
Who saw what. Dee’s
black shewstone, see
better in the dark. Fresnel.
Galileo. Mary looking
up at the angel.

2.
Speaking of angels,
remember the one
posted at Eden’s gate,
flaming sword, to make
sure Adam didn’t sneak back in?
I wonder if that radiant
sentinel sometimes turned
and peered back into Eden
and from what he saw,
or didn’t see built a message
he came down to earth with
to console Adam and his kin–
you can’t go there, but with
the lens of the mind you can see
and by seeing almost be there.
Here, try this magnifying lens,
I made it for you from sand
of Eden, turned glass
by the fire of my sword.

3.
Grosbeak. Oriole… Wren.
We mark them in our minds
by seeing them up close
without violating the sacred
space of their distance. Bench.
Fence. Feeder. Put the spyglass
back in the satchel. No way out
from what we have seen. Seeing
is such a commitment! I can hear
the wise woman say as she picks
up the remote to turn TV off.

4.
The way Pieter Saenredam
could see a church, sent his eye
high up to the roof of the nave
so his painting could look down
on the immense emptiness
of the cathedral, made emptier
by a person or two but how
could he see himself down there
from way up here, where we are?

5.
So when your eyes
are far
away enough
you can see everything.

10 May 2023

Every poem
is a sealed indictment.
Open it only
when you’re alone
is the empty
courtroom of the soul.

10 May 2023

A poet is a person
on trial
in a round courtroom
before eight
billion judges,
demonstrate innocence
by language alone.

9.V.23

Tiny principality along
the Hudson River, Its flag
a newly invented fabric:
mirror silk, it shows you
looking at it, through it,
ripples when you salute.
The nation’s motto:
You see what you are.
Others translate it:
You are what you see.

8 May 2023