ROBERT
KELLY

                                                   for Charlotte

1.
We unfold from the stone

cabbage leaves
crisp curled tight—

slice through the matrix
and find the geode,

slice through what they call
the head and find
our original face.

Animal vegetable mineral.
The distinctions fade,
the face persists.

2.
Once you took some photos
of a head of red cabbage
I’d sliced through the middle
and other slices other angles,
so many faces, diagrams,
maps and measures.

All of them meant us—
a picture anyhow
always means the one
who makes it,
the one who sees it.

3.
Warmer today
still some leaves
on the beech tree,
who will tell in me
what to say
when they fall?

That’s where you come in—
that’s what we have to be
to each other,
                              evergreen, obvious.

4.
You gave me a geode
amethyst grotto,
I gave you a cabbage,
map of my mind.

Proportions vanish,
any line leads anywhere—
mystery of poetry
any word leads everywhere.

5.
I try to give you something of value
but everything I offer
is a shadow of what you give me,
no diamond worthy of your finger.

6.
Light thickens in among the trees
because the branches talk so much
just as I suppose inside our skin
the light fades fast in the commotion
blood and fluids, chemicals at play,
how dark it must be inside us
though that’s where light is born
or at least where it comes from.

7.
The other side of the park
was a mystery to me.
Streets had numbers and no names
but the sea was closer,
the houses separate and small.
I could not understand it—
the other side of anything
is difficult enough, but why
was the other side of Marine Park
so different from us? The sea
is the same, I thought,
and I have sung that to myself
every day, praying that I’m right,
the sea is the same, the sea
is the same. But Malibu is no Oahu,
yet on the rocks of Gloucester
splash the waves of Gerritsen
and maybe I still have hope,
the sea is the same,
maybe the other side
one day will be the same
and we will be there,
cute little houses, a roughcut beach.

8.
As if we give each other
everything that is to come.

We cook the cabbage of course,
turns purple red as it stews,

the images dissolve,
the deep sweetness of the leaf
comes out, teased by our salt.

9.
The sun is bright right now
over where we live—
the humble gift of everything there is.

See, when I woke up I thought
of what it’s like to saw through rock
or slice through cabbage,

how there is a brain
inside everything, me again,
sure that the rock stinks.
But then the pain comes,
of knowing what is thinking
the wound of revelation
changing the face of what we see.

But stone and cabbage,
not a diamond, not a rose?

10.
We interrupt this poem to bring you an important prose from the management. Language is at your service night and day. Language is at the root of every gift we give each other, Language tells a diamond from a chunk of glass, Language tells I love you loud and clear when signs and objects fumble at the door. Trust Language, Language means my heart is yours.

20 November 2020

I am no one yet.
But the sun is rising
so there is connection,
nothing happening
but the light.
                            I grow,
I prosper
the tyrant said,
every tyrant, every self.

2.
Don’t quote me
said the bird
but I know something,
something useful
hidden in my song.
Don’t worry, answered
a passing car,
my lips are sealed—
and it may be
your secret runs me too.

3.
Fast break
from night bread.

Hope happens
all over town,

there is no fence
though round
this man’s song.

One more tyrant
lights the lust. 

4.
Just because I wake
I have to say.
Sunlight gold
in dimming green.

In that tattered
sleep they call waking
I remembered walking
when I was a little boy
down The Flume—a stream
quick through narrow chasm
with wet stone walls,
the air made half of water.
I distracted myself by guessing
the name had to come from Latin,
flumen, neuter, ‘river.’
But that doesn’t help.
It still felt just
like walking down into myself,
slippery stone, sloping down,
and who would I be if I fell?

5.
The mountains have changed too.
The Old Man’s face
has crumbled off the cliff.
My ancestor I thought he was
since I had known no other.
The irony is that Self Reliance
is something you get from a book.

6.
There is no pain
in being itself
but being is strange,
strange. They ease
our fears by citing Nature.
Have you ever seen nature,
even running away?

 7.

The bird was quiet then,
his gospel still.
The listening car
is in Kingston by now,
how long the telling is.
The Absolute is everywhere,
the book lies open on the table.
We call it flying.
We call them wings.

8.
Come back and comfort me.
Music should never be diversion,
ever be a version
of what you really mean,
you who flute or note it
down for someone else
to sing with her fingers
or her lips, let them say
sacred what you mean
in all the frivolous funerals of the heart
and so the slightest touch
becomes profound.
You know all this,
how strong music makes us
but we must be weak, weak
to start with
before the glory brass and strings
wake us, mountains, meanings.

19 November 2020

The move is slow
the pool is now,
like a cloud
it does not like to let you
see it move.
                           Photography
a well-known
cure for shyness.

The alarm bongs,
the sky sleeps on.

2.
Mystery of her,
sandstone syntax
in a world of shale.
O slip me freshets
squeezed tween such rock,
the planet is four-fifths water
and we thirst.

3.
What words can do to each other,
crowded bar on Friday night
or duel at dawn,
                                    o be gentle,
sentence, just for once.

4.
If a cloud
turned to stone
would it talk
like you,
tackle the intricate
messages
heartbeat by heartbeat
until even I
could understand? 

5.
The cello is silent
but the theme comes back,
flutey doorways and a wind outside,
slimmer aperture shriller tone,
the cloud is still there,
know what I mean?

6.
Do the thing and be at peace,
change your name
or I’ll change it for you,
go choose an opera,
listen soundless as you walk
half on purpose
through the dwindling wood–
all paths lead here,
this house you see
just beyond the covered well,
water maybe ripe for you.

7.
Don’t bother knowing
where you’re going—
the going knows
and that’s enough
to get you there
with lots of tales to tell.
Remember?

8.
The catapult
we called a slingshot,
the pebbles we let fly
only at things we thought
we could not hurt—
trees or boulders in the stream.
How wrong we were—
everything feels pain
only some of us complain.
The hammer once as holy as the cross.

8.
Cross?
Spirit penetrating matter,
vom Himmel hoch
the line comes down.
They meet, become
body of the perfect man
born from the heart,
the ever-virgin heart.
Something like that—
the vertical presses through
the horizontal,
heaven stands on earth.
Something like that.
The builder’s hammer,
Thursday priests,
sign in the sky. 

9.
I’m just trying to understand—
you knew I was going to say that,
I could see your lips
mouthing the words an instant
before they came out of my mouth,
everybody knows what I mean,
my great revelations
turn out to be reminders.
Clouds move slow
across the northern sky,
I can’t prove it
but they do move.

16 November 2020

When midnight comes
dig down and excavate
the hypogeum
below the heart,

that sacred space
deepest in you
you can only find
by building it.

Touch nothing there—
just the ground
you stretch out on.

Everything else down there
is not for you
but only for your sleep,
language and landscape.

By doing nothing
your work is done.
Sleep tight. Sleep bright.

15 November 2020

Glacis of the castle
trenches of the Marne
streets of Chicago
the long war winding down

we are born into an army
my uncle gassed by the Boche
my tree fell in the blizzard
what can we do

they used to call it Armistice Day
but now they say Veterans
as if the war was over
and all the troops came home

I surrender I surrender
do not make me fight

fighting is for children
grown-ups wait it out,
write it out
until the long war peters out

he coughed for the rest of his life
bigger than my father
but you could tell they were brothers

Samuel sang and Seymour coughed
and the war goes on

streets of Portland
plazas of Hong Kong,

listen to me, I don’t know
what I’m talking about,
I just know the war is ending
here and there a little,
ending slow, ending fierce,
the anger louder than the gun
but then the quiet comes
and we surrender.

2.
Plate glass windows
divide us from the sky,
protect us maybe from
breathing what we see,

what gives us light.
There is a wall around me,
the kind that lepers wore,
Unclean, unclean I cry

but do I mean I am or it is,
am I safe from it or it from me?
O glass wall of language,
plate glass of my thought!

3.
Out the back door
up over the hill
watch the mallards
possess the stream,

give up deciding,
yield to the duck
yield to the river,
surrender to everything

you do not mean.

4.
Color is the first precision.
That’s what flags are all about,
enlist in the red army,
blue army, infantry of green.
We are born into the service
as they used to call it,
servicemen and servicewomen
and whom do we serve?
Serve in the forces
armed and unarmed
and what do the forces serve?

Every day I surrender again,
I am a Prisoner of Peace
interned in the natural world,

o tree my guard, my guardian,
my chaplain, comrade, guide.
The war is almost over,
the road is almost there,
love of what is just past the world.

8 November 2020

I mean
we are
to be
and be again
all over,

so many gone
Neanderthal
Denisovan
all gone
gone into us
far as they
we can be.

2.
So why am I
telling you this
you are younger
you know it better
than I remember so
why do I clamber
to tell you,
be near you,
your sleeve
my mountain?

3.
There is no argument
between us,
just a fold of fabric,
silk or soft as.
Can cloth count?

Ask the rabbis
whose deck we stand on—
they’ll tell you
the captain’s name
but I’ll name the ocean.

4.
I can almost remember
how it began,
speckled egg pale blue,
a fox running off,

and then the woods
all quiet, page in a book.
I can almost remember
before the machine.

The dithering silence
that worried us so, so
some of us spread our legs,
some touched wire to wire,
some hummed in the corner,
broke a window
and the machine began.

5.
So many have walked
through that door
or idled chatting
in the doorway,
laughing or doubting,
leaning on the frame.
And then went in.

6.
So many have become
what we are—
but who is this ‘we’
of whom one speaks?
Time
             to be again
and never know!
Blessed silence
between the loud strokes
of the blessed machine!
All about remembering
there is nothing to remember.

4 November 2020

The past spoils now
and the future
doesn’t help. I want
this simple thing, this
tangerine of the moment
to peel and pull apart and taste
segment by segment, each
in all its sweetness,
and chew the soft pulp of it
after and after, and it still
will be now.

3 November 2020

                                           sleeps.
From Zoroaster and Empedocles
and Nietzsche in his own neighborhood
a few blocks away in time he’s learned
that special kind of sleeping they call
being awake and quiet and doing nothing,
especially not thinking, even his mother
used to say sleep with eyes open
darling, then you’ll really see. What did
she know? Why did it take Persia, Greece,
Switzerland to remind him of that
simple thing he always knew?
Sleep wide-eyed, open-minded sleep
intimate with whatever passes
casting any random thought
aside, ignore the seductions
of causality, break the chains of inference.
Sleep lively, miss nothing, follow nothing,
anything that moves or seems to mean,
that’s just children playing on the lawn.
They’ll be gone soon. The lawn remains.
Study the lawn. Keep your mind pure
till ordinary sleep comes along
and relaxes you into the dark. The day too
will tell you many things, just as long as
you are wise enough to ask no questions.

1 November 2020

1.
The other side
of what I mean
is what I mean.

2.
I walk there
again and again
it is so close.

3.
Time to read
a book
or be one. 

4.
Children
are waiting
around in me.

5.
I wait with them,
waiting is
the same as being.

6.
What does it mean
to be wise
or be anything?

7.
When salmon swam
a pool became,
a tree leapt up.

8.
Getting closer
the feel becomes
bird in the sky.

9.
Standing
and under
standing what?

10.
The numbers fade
the fact remains
I mean the face.

1 November 2020

maybe,
a Trojan wrote the Iliad
but who was Milton?
Would a Christian know,
care, so much about hell?
Blake said Milton was
“of the Devil’s party,”
a Whig in spirit, a thorn
in God’s side. Maybe.
Maybe we all are Jews
and never knew it. What
is there anyhow to know,
we say what comes to mind
and praise fine weather.
The lineage is language
even if we lie, even if we seem
to praise killer Achilles
our hearts are safe in Troy,
eternal tower, Helena
at the gate welcoming
all of our fervent mistakes.
Call this the lineage, the line
we stumble along, hoping
it leads us to clarity
through landscapes of beauty
alone. Hum, come along
with me, we’ll sing our way
there yet, line by line, just
a few songs more and we’re there.

31 October 2020