ROBERT
KELLY

1.
Among the river gods
we revere one on the other side,
hair in the eye,
slothful argument.
We know her name
and that eases our debate,
we saw her ride from the shallows
and in some glory ascend
into the forest of all the rest of us.

2.
Is the will free,
is free will ever so,
is there a willer in us
all clean and unimpeded?
That’s what we had to solve
in the sanhedrin of the dream
all night long.

3.
Better, I thought,
to watch her
as long as she was visible
among the woodlots,
unmistakable shimmer of her going.
No, the will is not free yet.

4.
Consider the shale beds
behind your house,
little cliff, a man could fall
and still survive, maybe hurt
a bone or two on that descent.
How each century left its stone
identity for the next to cover
and nice fresh living dirt
fills the crannies with grass
and soon flowers. Earth
tries to help us understand the will.

5.
Those who dare to sleep
athwart or across the meridians
rather than aligned with the poles
endure fierce dreams.
Your choice, dear friend.
The howl still hurts my head.

6.
Texts were being offered
burnt with reverence
on an altar some ways ahead.
A friend took one of mine
and hurried on. I stood,
feeling weak, my work done,
in the woods. I perched
on a stool by the path, knew
something had begun.
In monasteries they call it the retreat.

7.
The postcard said
You are always halfway home.
But where is she
or he who wrote it
and why no signature,
just a picture of the river,
Danube I guess,
but east of Budapest.

8.
So where had my will gone,
Voluntas mea, when I needed
her so badly in the woods,
I mean the woods on this side,
not across the river.
These trees, the exact
inscription of their bare
branches on the ever-patient sky,
where is she when I need her well,
I read what things are saying
but till she comes close
I cannot speak a word.
Or so it seems. I clutch
the tree trunk and call again.
And this too is a word, isn’t it?

9.
So be careful where you wake
after you’ve been sleeping.
The will wanders, daylight
wields confusions of its own.
If you sleep on your back
who is that you spot on the ceiling?
If you sleep on your side
what is that on which you turn your back?
Nothing’s easy, the machine
keeps running, you start to remember.
And maybe your pillow
still has news for you.

14 January 2021

The rain was still falling but the hen went on pecking at her concerns along the edge of the road. A white bird, ashen really, vigorous and wet. I’m not sure than I’m not one of those people who expect other people to do their chores for them, looking at the rain and the wet road, it was hard to be sure. The writing table then, a right old antique, had fleurs-de-lys in yellow wood inlaid into the slightly darker phillipine mahogany. Colors!

Letters don’t write themselves, I mean, and the woman is waiting down in that ridiculous city for some word from me—not a reply, how can one “reply” to affection, tenderness. Something has to be said. I’m sure you’ve noticed how the heating coil on a hotplate or electric range turns always to the right, as if a left-trophic turn would suck the natural heat out of meat or root and leave it instead a frigid corpse-white on a pan too old to touch. I mean too cold—but you know that: see, I almost left it for you to discover, be my corrector.

Remember, there is some tropical fruit or gourd which, hollowed out and dried, can be pierced here and there with holes and become an ocarina, that ‘little goose’ fluty thing ovally round and nestles in the palm of the hand, hooty-hoot the soft sound of it played. Now is the song inherent in the gourd, and all our native crafts exist to let it out? Ask this about everything.

By now the chicken is out of sight, hidden in the bushes or maybe flown away. Can chickens still fly? If not, is it Darwin or the farmer’s knife responsible for their grounding? Look what happened to penguins, and nobody even eats them. Can chickens even swim?
It is at moments like this that one says to oneself, or I say, my God, the road is empty, empty. What can I tell the woman in Belem? A little song: If you care / why are you there? Dangerous. One thing I’ve learned: we are all where we should be. Going was our first mistake.

I hope the fox didn’t get the hen. Time for music. I turn on the radio on the table, internet, set for the Catholic station in Vienna plays classical music 24/7, tossing little maxims and bon-mots between the selections, but all in German so they don’t break in to the solemn worship music is, if you don’t mind my saying so. Listen if you like.
But I have to write something. Language demands hat of her children—hear a word, say a word. That’s the rule. Why is she even in Brazil? Crocodiles, and river dolphins that come up on land at midnight to court young women, so I’ve been told. Or is that another city? There are so many. So little empty spaces left for me and the chicken. And the fox. So maybe I’ll tell her that: Dear friend, there is an empty road between our houses, bending always to the right, it will bring us together as the world turns. There. That doesn’t make much sense but at least it’s written. Maybe the sense comes later, grows out of the worlds, like ordinary flowers when this winter is over.

13 January 2021

1.
Wrap me in colors
for I would see
myself seen
as I am, parceled
by sunlight
into districts
of desire, marshes
of dream,
blue seas of renewal.
For colors tell
all, keep no secrets,
yellow sapphire,
blood-brown amber
with the sun
still in it, so many
years, the tiny
bright sky in the heart
of the diamond,
mother’s ring,
everything reminds.

2.
Even now someone is writing
a note to me from a distant city:
“I dreamt great sheets of green,
not grass, not any special thing,
just sheets of color. So I knew
right then that I was you.”

3.
These things are permanent.
Colors fade but color never does.
Reach out and take what you need,
ivory of your steady hand.

4.
In the hills some men are saying
prayers to help the world go round,
and with their words or sounds
or brains or breaths, who knows,
they fumble beads with their thumbs,
little ones in lapis, broad in bone.

5.
Everything we say
has color too.
Or hear someone remark,
or just the weather
sounding its way
unceasingly our own.
On these grey winter days
open the dictionary,
it will be our crayon box enough.

11 January 2021

1.
That day at last again
the showing.
Now we examine, evaluate,
what has come to be shown,
come to be seen.

2.
I guess they used the gold
to feed and take care of
the Child and themselves.
The incense I imagine they burned,
watching the smoke drift off
the way prayers do,
turning into the sky.
What did they do with the myrrh? 

3.
Now it’s time to flee to Egypt,
the big country called
the rest of the year.
Big river, stone buildings,
statues of improbable gods
so strange they must be real.
Breakfast lunch and supper.
One way streets.

4.
I don’t want to be relevant
I want to be right.
Slowly what we have learned
turns into summer.
All the children are grown up,
at this distance hard to tell
one from another.
We’re all adults now,
we are who we are.
That is what summer means.

5.
And that’s why so many years in Egypt,
so many months from now
to solstice, when the sun
comes in the front door.
He whispered this to me
before he went away.

6 January 2021

The year begins to speak to me
quietly as my own breath—
have I confused myself
with what’s around me?
Am I just the time of things again?
Whatever the word is,
the year is speaking.
Young winter, mild sky.
Everything is prophecy.

2.
I begin to feel again
like the self you know.
And I am here for you,
so at least I have shown
up for work on time—
that’s the good kind of year.

3.
He swept away liturgy
he rolled away the stone.
Come in and sit down
in the dark and know your mind
he said and then come out again
and make the world happy
one by one.

4.
I think of that now,
the calm of the inner room
where we learn to be
and do something useful
with our being. And what
a wonder is a simple door.

5.
Mystery is a white tree
up the road,
a road is a riddle.
So many friends have
walked into the sky,
amazing how their voices linger
or I feel them almost at my fingertips.
Tree on a hill,
sky hidden in the sky.

6.
If you’re so smart, she said,
you could dance in your dreams
where feet are nimble
and syllables count themselves
up and down the famous steps
the Viennese set such store on.
By now she’s lost me, I’m stuck
yet again trying to find a name.
A name not mine. Or not mine yet.

7.
When it comes
it will sound at first
like language
then as you listen longer
it will seem music
and finally silence.
But your hands feel
as if there’s something
firm and clean in them,
an oval lapis perhaps
or a flower bulb but
you look down and they’re empty.
But the word has been spoken.

2 January 2021

When the words were free
the child picked them up
sucked on them, hid them
in his cheeks beside his teeth,
breathed into them and hoped.
Do you remember hope?
That this word you rolled
around in your mouth could be
something outside, someone
who could come talk to you?
Nobody talks to children, remember?
Years later there’s a little
plowed snow beside the road
here and there, most of it melted.
Even at year’s end the grass
is faintly green, at least not any
other color would describe it.
Remember color?
Remember describing
things to people who look at you
with pity or amusement as you try
to say what you have seen?
And you had only the words.
Everything else was locked up outside
in other people’s lives,
houses, churches, cars.
There is so much to remember.
So much to say, the words
still soft in your mouth.

Best wishes for the New Year
                          2021
from Robert & Charlotte Kelly

1.
A transparent banner
floats above a peaceful field,
no controversy in the stone.
She runs outside to give
the kids a treat, her hands
full of night and day, water
tumbling in the cleft.
These are my politics.

2.
Grey day, road tree and sky
the same no color. Up to us
to bring religion in again,
light the candle, rouge the lips.

3.
It’s all about money
this government stuff,
we all know that
so let’s think about something
else instead, music, say,
or where I left my wallet
last night, or who was
Robin Hood really, and could
you do all that with an arrow?

4.
The litmus of morning
specifies the mind.
I am identified—the window
recognizes my right to see.
For all I know I could be me. 

5.
Brave as a drunkard
I wave the flag again,
no sign on me, no dream
to clutter my clarity.
Yes, I say, why not?

6.
Don’t be cynical,
there are aunts in the parlor,
Rose and Sarah,
Uncle Seymour, cousin Norman,
they’ve been around a long while
and know what I can only
hope to guess.
Something missing in me,
I can never be them.

7.
Sky gets lighter
gets the earth darker.
8 A.M. if anybody wants to know,
this is a love song,
how could it not be,
you being so beautiful
and I lonely as a monk’s
hand holding his rosary.
One day after another
and each one counts as prayer.

8.
Dear Diana
you spread your arms
over the city,
you let us read
the lines in your palm
as if they show our fate too,
our nature I mean
and the birds fly by
and the rain sweeps your image
but you do not relent,
you keep your arms wide open,
welcoming, offering
the single gesture that will save us all
if we could learn to do it too,
come to my arms, read my hands.

9.
By now my flag
is smudged a little
with beliefs.
Still dim enough
to keep headlights on.
Time is a box
we unpack at our leisure—
call it ‘art’ to be obvious,
or Scarlatti on the cellphone
or the big creek at Wanatanka
pouring into the river,
wide, wide, I seem to sob
seeing it, remembering the sea.

30 November 2020

It said so in the sleep
but who was listening,
who can testify

and who was sleeping?
The radical explanation
is usually the best—

ink blot, gunshot, howl?
She thought she heard an owl
and why not, night,

night has its way with us,
voices and forgetting,
creaking stairs, the moon.

I’m trying to remember,
that’s all, so much gets lost
in the algorithms of lust,

fear, shivering under the sheet.
What did who say when,
twisted branches of context,

not one word remains.
How am I to understand
the sun if I lost the dark,

am I to make do with light
and air and food like
any animal? Animule

my father used to say,
he taught me the haughtiness
of play, play till all the meanings

rub away and leave you free
again, he taught me silence
is the deepest conversation.

29 November 2020

In the oceanography
of time we are the third
island from the core

we stole the land
from the In-digenes
who were always
here before us,
we called them In-dians
because we were from outside
or called them natives
because they were born here
and we haven’t been born yet.

2.
Who are we who stumbled
on this archipelago,
rafting across the great silence,
riding the cosmic rays
desperate to find
a mirror to gaze into
that would shows us our faces,
tell us who we are.

3.
I think we are the fetal mind
of what one day will be
the true humanity, sometimes
you hear our heartbeat
soft in the noise of all that happens.
Christ and Buddha showed the way
to what might yet become—
but we storybook’d the one
and killed the other though on
the third day he rose again
into us ever after, hear him?
or is that just my heart beating? 

4.
So who on earth
are we? Children
maybe, because
we keep asking questions,
good children if we do,
or bad if we think we know the answers
and insist. Be quiet,
little one, we say to ourselves
when we should say Shout
your questions,
the night is waiting for them,
each night a different
answer and we live.

27 November 2020

Imagination is made of trees,
old cars and girls on skis,
bungalows and crocodiles
and every now and then one
word or two that rises from
the sacred compost of sleep,
silence from which we rise,
clumsy flowers with one perfect leaf.

26 November 2020