ROBERT
KELLY

They looked like strangers
so we called them friends,
had them sit down, fed them
milk and blueberry bread,
no meat yet, not sure what
their religion. And they ate.
They called the bread muffins
and the little fruit inside
they called huckleberries
so we knew we had nothing to fear.

2.
She kept looking back
as she ran ahead,
made sure we were following
and we were, though she’d
stop sometimes so we slower
could come close to catching
up with her, then she’d run on
and we’d follow. We follow.
Every now and then
she gives us a breather
and then again run on, o
that look on her face
as she looks back over her
right shoulder and runs on.

3.
And so it’s never clear
if we are the guests or the hosts.
Food changes hands. People
run and stop. We go indoors,
we settle on sofas, a phone rings
and we’re off again, she looks back
to make sure we follow.
What would happen if we didn’t,
if we just stood still,
or sat there on the couch,
nibbling, parsing the shadows?

4.
I feel ashamed for even asking.
She is to be followed.
They are to be fed.
Somehow it coheres
and we are where we are
at any given moment home.
This is not wisdom,
this is fact. Now calculate
the distance between.
She’s looking back at us again,
I could almost swear she’s smiling.

12 September 2020

from which one falls
back to the practiced earth
as a sleeper
wakes into the grain of day.

2.
The tiger walks around the house at night,
stops at the doorway and looks in
to watch the peaceful sleepers breathe—
how sweet the breath of humans is
when they sleep! Sugar of dream,
oil of darkness, horizontal innocence—
he is content, turns and pads away
down the hallway no one knows.

3.
These things will happen us
until we rouse.
And even then the night
is full of plebiscites and fall elections
the day must bear to love with,
find your way home,
finish the food on your plate
if you can find it. And so on.
The dream broke like an egg
and you fell out—
that’s what the doctor told me
when I asked was I OK.
Daytime is dangerous
I think she meant, the sun
sees everything and remembers.

4.
Away with wee fears,
the everlasting fire
the sky catches its light from
sustains the toad
or whatever kind of creature
you think you are.
Fear is good for you,
you notice more and jabber less,
lie in the lap of the biggest fear
and suddenly there is nothing
there at all, just you at peace
in the blue sky, shapely clouds
here and there, all the answers
everywhere, ready for your questions.

5.
The sermon ended,
I looked around to see
what would-be god
had spoken so, I saw
my own shadow on the rock,
a rock I didn’t know was there,
a world simple with surprises.

6.
In the old days they thought
the sun was a sweet tear drop
from a ring of holy fire
around everything that exists.
They thought the mind
could find its way
disguised as soul
out to the limits of that fire
and know itself suddenly
part of what it beheld.

7.
The women and men who had
gone there and come back
did not have much to say.
Go, see for yourselves—
that seemed to sum up their report,
Go, be a soul and travel,
slip through the cage of the actual,
be a new being and come back.
How long will it take, we used to ask—
Between one breath and the next
you can go there and live there
and grow old there and come home.

11 September 2020

Express
the moor montage

rufous towhee
on bare branch
over heather

heather

mild you to mean it
dream we live on

dirt under glacier
heather path
to hilltop
either

therefrom
scrutinize the sea
never hurt to

especially now
the wind so
rare from the east

the bird in you
hearkens

hear everything
while it can

speak

whose house
had crushed
seashells the
path to it

suspend judgment

take the winner’s
side for a change

heather
Lent in August

promise no names
have all been spoken

blue pebble
sand all the way
up here

the things they do
rain pool

whose hips
happening the hill

bird scare
fox in heather

heather

mind is where
names are stored

mix them up
as music

on the parapet
a silence

left over
from so many wars

from far
green of
aspen down there

woodcock
in hedge

the bird says

if you miss
the island
you still have the sea.

7 September 2020

The small sounds of before
no louder than a bird a block away,
the mini-fridge, the breeze in leaves.
These quiet voices say Again.

2.
The first thing you notice
about children
is how loud their voices are,
piercing the educated
calm of the ordinary day.
School mutes them, eventually
teaches mumble, buys silence,
silence is best. I was a child once
but it didn’t last. Now hear
my whispering roar.

3.
Culture seems sometimes
built on blame.
Eve’s temptation,
Prometheus’s presumption,
lots of Latin words for
how bad we are and why
all things we have seem stolen
and money masters mind.
And all these years we race
to put things right.

4.
A stone, any stone can be
a column in front of your house too,
Socrates, to lean on while you think,
that wordless dream
from which sometimes
truth wakes to speak.

5.
The trees of course know better.
They proliferate
and thereby civilize.
We think better in their shade.

6.
I keep trying to figure things out,
cold fingers, Wallace Stevens,
compass on the dashboard,
Bruckner’s Ninth, tomorrow
turns out to be one more today.
I don’t dare close the window.
If I had a fireplace and a fire in it
I’d tear the calendar off the wall
and toss it in. But no calendar.
Just the wall. A wall is good.
Pray to the wall and close my eyes.

7.
And then she woke again
and was the Sun.
The Moon in his sly way
had left her once again.
The planet lay outspread
before her, breakfast,
this sumptuous reality.
She smiles now as she feeds
us from the sky, we eager trees.

8.
Wait. Go back to Hartford,
Whorf and Stevens
due east of here, an hour
and some over away,

where Charlotte was born,
my wife, my life renewed.
And their river too flows
both ways, sea slips inland
and heals the country silence.

Maybe not so strange they
both were businessmen by day,
the linguist and the poet—
what more could love require
to sing itself into presence
and overwhelm the doubt?

I watch my sleeping wife
and learn to speak.

6 September 2020

still leads in
by turn.
The torque
is all that matters
still.
And there we,
awkward and solemn
as somebody
else’s grandparents
in an old snapshot—
how have we come
to such a place
baffling as a dream?
Again, the word
brought us here,
the word unspoken
slept with the one we spoke.
No we. I mean me.
Don’t let me get
away with generalities
as if I spoke for all humans.
I speak for all beings.

2.
As I said or was saying
I got said. Miracles
still happen, the ship
did not sink, the ship we’re on
we think of as a chubby planet
actually is a slim
frigate sailing through space.
As I was saying, I was said.
I was sent to wander
through fancy very expensive
old department stores,
boutiques big as cathedrals,
my task in that grey-green
fin-de-siècle dingy light
was no more than to discover
an exit, a way out to the street.
But everything was indoors
in that dream. Bathrooms
hard to find, the elevator tiny
but the people smiled.
The last to get on was a small
Japanese—I liked his grey sweater.

3.
Sometimes it’s enough
to close a door to be there.
When you come into that room
the first thing you notice
is the flowers—
blue hydrangeas
in a clear glass bowl
so it must be summer
and the sea not far.
Those flowers make the room
a garden—sit down and be at peace
they seem to say. But then
you look around and see
the furniture of a demanding life,
desk, table, bookcase, TV.
What manner of creature
you wonder lives here,
plagued with images,
praying to the decent flowers?

4.
Do you remember
the first time
you lived on earth?
And what about
the time before?
So vague, so vague,
like the name
of someone you thought
or thought you loved
once and all
you can bring to mind
is a little ruby they wore.
Try harder, the past
is scarier than the present,
yes, I know, but still,
you are the shadow
you cast then, and I,
poor me, am just
the ground on which
your shadow falls.

5.
Words are folklore
nothing more
the scholars claim
but John said otherwise
and I want him to be right
but I want it to be
folklore too, the truth
we pass along unconsciously
while we talk about spinach
or taxes or the cool morning,
a word leads nowhere
and everywhere at once
and it is such a joy to follow,
trusting, trusting
the lore, the folk, the God
the word was that spoke us
and we spoke. All
of this is answering.

6.
Whorf was excited that
the Hopi had no special
verbal form to say past action.
O they could tell the present
from the past but their verbs
did not contain that information.
A verb is permanent
as an action is. It is true
whenever it was or will be.
Imagine Whorf in Connecticut
thinking about all that,
around the same time Wallace
Stevens was busy in Hartford too—

o time, time, you mean
so much to me
and I so little mean to you.

7.
Into the trees then,
the true,
the words they speak
that aren’t ours
but we can listen.
Not the lazy listen
we give to bird song
but eager, open-
hearted hearing
reverently available
to what we don’t understand
but does keep talking,
and will until we do,
the other word,
the word that is out.

5 September 2020

Of the earth,
the field,
the known place.
The known.
Walk over to the word
and take its hand,
it squeezes back,
you hear it
halfway to your heart.
That is what it means
‘to mean,’
to be in the middle
of something and know
where you are.

2.
The sky looks sunshine
the trees look rain.
And now the trees light up—
surrealism never lasts,
the farmer leans
again on his shovel,
the dirt pretends to part—
the natural politeness of physics
can be counted on
but not too far.

3.
So I wonder
like everyone before me
whose breath
is the wind?
The question
does not get old,
the answer
shimmies ever
off through the trees,
‘trees’ hear meaning
whatever we see
as we go on breathing.
Asking. Digging.

4.
There is a big field
not far from here
where you can stand and see
almost to the horizon
on all sides. Nowadays
you have to stand
up to your shoulders in corn
but still. Horizons
in a land of forests!
Come with me,
help me to see so we
can look all ways at once,
maybe finally
get a sense of what
a field really is,
coaxing the light down.

4 September 2020

Suppose a ship.
Not necessarily that
trim craft Dante
with some of us boy poet
friends set out
upon the slender sea
in quest of the magic island
where the Word grows,
haunted by a hungry Muse,

suppose a ship, doesn’t have
to be a liner nosing through ice floes
or an ironclad scared of torpedoes,
a ship we have to suppose,
not even a Norwegian freighter
o that deep blue flag in new light
lipping at dawn up the Narrows
between Brooklyn and Staten Island,
between where I lived and where I worked,

suppose a ship, of course
not a cruise ship
pretending to be a city
or an aircraft carrier
pretending to be an island,
suppose a ship, no authentic
caravel carrying Aztec gold to Spain,

be patient with me, suppose
a ship, not a ferryboat
across the Bosporus, not a skiff
on the Baltic, bright-haired
warriors scudding towards
one more battle,

suppose a ship
instead as calm as the sea
it proposes to ride, suppose
a ship empty, sails furled
neatly, resting at the shore
peaceful as a sleeping nun,

suppose we make our way
down the sands and climb on board,
suppose the inscrutable crew
casts off so we drift
slowly enough almost across
the current as the wind
picks up, no sails up yet,
we wonder about that,
the wood of the deck
is fresh and clean, the taffrail
polished and smooth,
is it leather maybe? hide
of some ancient beast still soft?

Above us they’re unmuzzling the sails,
suppose we feel for the first time,
maybe the first time ever,
what the sea is saying to our feet,
subtle sway of limbs, balance,
suppose its word seeps
up into us, reaches the shallows
of loins and heart and mind,

the ship is moving steady now,
the sails boisterous, loud creak of wood,
noisy boot-steps of the unseen crew
doing whatever it is they do

and we go! Suppose we go
and keep going
as long as the sea
keeps talking,
and is there ever
night on this ocean?

Suppose there are cabins down below
or bunk beds or hammocks,
suppose we can sail
all day and into the dark
then sleep easy into day again
and go along wittingly with
whatever the sea was saying,
saying even now,
suppose the ship
is underneath us now
and we have sailed
all the way to today,
storm-free, the horizon clear.

3 September 2020

The streets are wet outside
and I heard rain—
I’m being logical again,
not always a safe call.
Sage move. The streets
are open about what happens
and give clear hints
of where they go.
But nothing of the past.
Who knows where anything
comes from? This rain
I infer from heaven
as they used to call the sky
with a logic of their own.

2.
And who were they?
Ancestors clearly
but how to prove it?
All the noble DNA analyses
tell us more or less
where someonebodies
lived or went or came from
on a long trail of maybes.
But never who? So
who are they anyway
who made us who we are?

3.
Does it matter,
as the street would say.

Here we are, and we
are mysterious enough.

Which of us has looked
asked Thomas Wolfe
into his brother’s heart.

And I don’t even a brother,
if you know what I mean.

Just an endless series of I and you
covering the planet

with colza beans and Cadillacs
as nobody used to say.

4.
Which leaves the streets wet
and the sky far away
as usual. I was going
to say that in French
but it would sound snarky
or show-offy, just like me,
comme d’habitude.

5.
You can tell I’m struggling
with anxiety, a whole brain
full of what its tenant
doesn’t want to think about.

Anxiety silences desire,
shrivels perception, cancels
meaningful speculation
about astronomy and history.

When smart poets are anxious
they keep quiet. Why don’t I
just go for a walk. Rain
never hurt anyone, did it?
Then I think of poor Chausson
dead in a bike crash—
what was the weather like
that day, and was he singing?

6.
The thing to do
is not say I today—
then there will be no one
to interfere with the song.
And it will all be song and sense and you.

2 September 2020

Soft day
teach me something.
Pearl sky,
remind me
there is yielding
to be done,
letting, letting go.

And dear trees,
some of you know
how hard it is
to be green all year round,
tell me how

or at least teach
long peaceful sleep
where I can dream
what flowers when I wake.

Grey sky
full of the softest light
settles around us
like the prayer
of a child
who has been praying
from the beginning of the world

1 September 2020

photo by Charlotte Mandell