ROBERT
KELLY

Boiling softly rice until it swells
and then the question comes:
is eating one single grain of rice
(soft now too, salty from the brine)
the same as eating rice?
Is saying je t’aime and meaning it
the same as speaking French?
Is saying it the same as love?

2.
We are parts of what?
I am a grain of what?
Is growing up the same
as cooking rice?
Or let me bother you again:
is one snowflake the same as snowing?
I will sit here till the answer comes.
something about numbers,
something about the sky.

3.
A smiling round-faced girl
brought the platter in.
Can you tell already
that I’m lying? The rice
never left the pan. One grain
only did I taste of it.
Nothing happened but the image did.

4.
Sundays in Heaven
must be special days
when all the fortunate ascended
turn their devotions down on us
the billions of beings
ripening below, each one
of us a grain. Sometimes
they use sunshine to study our dreams.

5.
This morning is all white and grey,
I try to exit from the dream
but once dreams get inside you
you’re inside them for good.
I want to be a car, headlights on,
hurrying towards anywhere, even here.

7 February 2021

Unusual tool of the day,
the day I hold in my hand
to pry time open with
and see, just see.

2.
Rusty old el train
tracks overhead,
the long street so busy
darkened by all the going
above it, I know this city,
nothing like iron
to make you feel at home.

3.
At the top of the stairs
up to the station
she crouches,
retrieves something
from the iron meshwork,
something small,
stows it in her white jeans.
This is America
and I will never know.

4.
The reflection of the white lampshade
in the window through which
I study the colorless day outside
all grey and snow looks
strangely like a yellow tree—
I thought you should know.

5.
A voice in the hip pocket
sings an iron song,
you listen a while
then try to write it down,
a language you can’t name
but in words you understand,
seems to say Everything I am
is for somebody else, anybody,
everybody, even you.

6.
Who are these strangers
who live in us,
venture out only when we sleep
and then make free
of all our streets, cities,
parts of speech?
What did she put in her pocket?
Was it me? The key
is rusty but opens every door.

5 February 2021

This kind of bird
can come straight from the sky
and pass through glass
and bring its beak to you.
Nothing shatters except
someplace in you you thought
was all your own. But now
the bird has come, small as a dove,
sort of white like last week’s snow,
and after one painful introduction
has taken up residence in you.
Your tenant from the sky.
You can feel the wings rustling,
hear its soft cooing sometimes
when your head is on the pillow
teaching you both the path
to the other side of sleep.

4 February 2021

I did not let the word
sink all the way in,
I covered the page too soon.
Now I wander around
thirsty for the rest of it,
all through this tree town,
Dendropolis, looking up,
looking down, watching
the gutters gushing with
the crystal clear waters
of what the word meant.

4 February 2021

I had no dreams last night
so have nothing to report
except the weather

yet I’ve never been able
to chant with all the intelligent
reverence it deserves
the uncanny mystery of snow.
So what shall we talk about now?

Somehow we are children
still in the nursery
and every thing we see
is a window onto something else.

There, that’s something said,
something transcendent.
Never doubt the word that comes.
It is the portal of the temple,
open door to love’s boudoir.

1 February 2021

I thought I was there enough to be here,
thought the sky was free
to fly in if I could fly,
I thought the flowers at my feet
had me in mind
then it all, I all, changed—
why did you make me grow up?

I didn’t know how to answer the child
or whatever he was,
I was silent but looked serious
as much as I could make my face look
to show him that I cared, at least,
even if I had no answer,
didn’t even understand his question.

Then he shouted:
Why did you grow me up?
His voice had the child’s shrill
hidden in the man’s timbre.

I wanted to calm him
or make him less unhappy,
so I mumbled something about
how I had no choice,
we happen to each other,
can’t help it, things happen.

Then, more calmly but no less sternly
he explained: Things
do not just happen.
We happen them.

Yes, I cried in turn,
we happen them and they happen us,
the snowdrops at your feet
really do mean you,
the sky is waiting for your consent,
then we can both fly.

Yes, he said, you’re right.
But where will we go?
Where will we go?

25 January 2021

midmorning
color of the trees
changing vowels
in the middle of the word
mean what the sound says
for a change
but the old-fashioned wire
still stretches
from sender to receiver
just like any sky
blue when She is yellow
otherwise otherwise.

2.
Gravamen, the bedrock
meaning of what you mean
that’s what the day
insists on hearing—
tune your tubes accordingly,
the hollow hurry of your breath,
leave your damned lute unpluck’t
and shout your song.

3.
But how.
Moo-cow on the meadow
baa-lamb in the byre.
Be young. Younger.
Babies howl, children whimper,
adolescents sulk.
Get loud. The cloud
is waiting to part
at your command.

4.
I tell you these bold moves
but mouse along myself.
That’s what comes of knowing Latin,
reading books, watching women
slyly from the corner of the missal,
eating oats for breakfast,
being Irish and other lies.
I don’t have the chutzpah to be real,
I slink along in shadowland
murmuring my dialects
but at least I leave you hints
along the way. This way.

5.
Why can’t this be
a long poem about the Nile
from mountain Africa
a land so flat they had to build
a pyramid to touch the sun.
Why can’t this flow
long and natural and gleaming
full of interesting dangers
crocodiles and princesses
fetching Moses from the stream.
Or did she hide him there herself,
this little Lenin of the pharaohs
who led the workers
dryfoot through the image of the sea
always looking for the truest mountain?

6.
See how soon I forgot the river
green and silky
just as much here as anywhere–
you know I’m still talking about vowels,
what else is there ever to say?
Love hovers like a dove above—
all resemblances are dangerous and true.

24 January 2021

Dig in.
               The gods are watching
from inside the stone.
Waiting for you
to give them faces,
bodies, maybe even names.

This is your job,
you were born here
shoeless and shivering
to do this kind of work
only you can do.

                                     Dig in
just far enough to work them free.
They will not thank you
in particular but they will be.
And when they are, all sorts of things
become possible—living,
going, even loving.

But that comes later. Dig
the image out of what just seems,
out of what you see.
It is so hard to see
what is really there.
That’s where digging comes in,
the hands find what the eyes miss

and there they are
in all their hidden glory,
out in the world again,
ready to free you who set them free.

17 January 2021

Does it mean jasmine,
the white flower that blossoms
so fragrant by the midnight lake,
Switzerland, life in quiet,
poetry as a sort of elegant hotel
that lets you, sometimes, sleep free?
What do we know of any flower?

Fresh from the shower a young
person hurried past me, I could feel
the wafture of cleanness, freshness
of natural skin, clothing
just an echo of the real beneath,
the flower beneath all our going,

is that the name of a place,
a waterfall with pale beavers below
engineering as they do a refuge,
the only thing it makes sense to build,
Gloucester Cathedral in late winter snow,
bungalows in Rockaway, Cambaluc.
We know so little of what they know,
flowers, yes, but also the names
we give our children, the names we ride,
we know nothing about the names
that guide us, lead us to the lake, say,

Carl Sauer says Homo is a genus
of the littoral, far from the sea
we wilt and fade, or else like Milarepa
build an ocean out of meditation
and live by its shore in unending light.
There, that’s two names in one argument,
and I still can feel the flutter of the one
who passed me, so quickly, in the dark.

I want to be a genius of the literal,
word by word till I understand
what it means to be a word,
to be a sound that even unspoken
hangs in the air around us
teasing us to remember. Who was
that person, flower, lake, mountain
that even at midnight showed clear
against the sky of the Chablais.
I feel the clean air rustle past me
and say jessamine, night-blooming,
H.D. saw it from her window when
exhausted by comfortable exile
she looked at the outside, and knew
she was home. The flower proved it.
I smelled one too, right there, trying
like a dim scholastic to decide
is this what any flower means?

16 January 2021

What other answer
could there be,
all the bright horses
leaping, panting and prancing
to get where they are.

2.
We travel so hard
to be here.
No sun, no rain,
but it’s worth it,
to see our shadows
vague on the frozen lawn.

3.
Because of the music
of course, the brass
fancy-work calliope
that plays by itself—
every child knows
that’s what makes the horses run
and it’s their endless stampede
drives the machinery
that makes the music come.
Every child knows
we cause each other
and then we forget.

4.
Sometimes there’s a swan-boat
or a dragon cart
and there the old folks sit
rescued from the up-and-down.
I sat there once gladly
in a very nice dragon
fierce and green and gold,
to watch the others jump
at the mercy of the beasts they ride.
Peaceful a moment
I travel where I am.

15 January 2021