ROBERT
KELLY

gently, gently,
no ideas,
whatever happens
is philosophy enough.
I’m not just saying
watch the birds
like some old Roman augur,
but there are worse
books you could read.
Just walk around,
the river can take care of itself,
the storm has passed,
only your cuffs are still wet.

2.
Have I told you
more than I meant to,
buzz in your ears,
some placid music
you have to rinse off,
and the rain has stopped?
If so, blame the air,
blame the holy human breath
that breathes and breathes
and every inhalation
is balanced by a word
that must speak out.
It’s only a little bit my fault
that I’m not a quieter animal
with a small vocabulary of growls.
No, breath masters me,
my words pester you,
for the sake of all that’s holy
it’s just a dance.

3.
I woke this morning
to the almost supernatural
clarity of Mendelssohn,
first piano concerto, end
of the first movement
and understood as never before
how free this music was
from moral obscurations,
empty emotions. It was pure
delight, an angel enraptured
by his own angelic freedom,
notes on the keyboard
as many as stars. And all
through the next two movements
the healing work went on.

4.
The you I keep bothering
with lyrical effusion
is a variable quantity,
a pure crystal glass full of listening.
But there is this me
who keeps saying I to you
dragging the whole business down—
not to earth but to some
grey middling neighborhood,
more dogs than trees,
windows dark by 10 PM.
Those clean dull streets
could that be the real
to which the poem summons you,
calls us both, stern
teacher with her mind on something else?
No—it means to creep along
like a minor Mendelssohn
joying in the sounds it makes,
trusting the breath
to make the world yet again
real enough to walk around in,
the birds louder than a book.

                                   30 August 2020

Another word was waiting.
The Trojan War. An empty
bottle floating in the surf,
volleying gently back and forth.
The shore. A spoon
to catch the sky in.
Mesdames et messieurs,
an ocelot for sale
on the left bank of the Seine
Sunday morning,
what kind of church is this.
Tumult of religion
when race is bad theology enough.
Open the side door. A moped
with a priest on it, all in white
and going fast. Car left idling
while the driver pees in the woods.
A familiar story
obscurely told, to quote a review.
What was the matter with the war,
why did it fizzle out, like rain,
is human violence
just a part of the weather?
An alabaster urn
to hold and honor emptiness.
Strange packages in the mail,
seven little roughly paper-wrapped
items covered with stamps,
how expensive to send me
and who would and what are they
small, each one a few ounces,
can rest on my palm, feel
soft inside, and seven of them,
stars? Dollars? Gleam
on the windshield of cars,
evidence of the sun,
Water of the saint’s canal
gently oozing south,
really, we always call water
by the wrong names,
wrong color, we don’t understand
water, we use so much of it,
our bodies are mostly it, yet
we gaze on it as a thing apart
when all you are is ocean am.
You are not the first person
to lose your way in these woods,
I have been wandering here
a thousand years at least
and all the roads lead further in.
Maybe the core is what it means,
like the old alchemists’ vitriol,
what you seek is deep inside
but you must purify yourself
and it to find it—something like that
their motto meant. Please,
feel free to use my telephone–
remember when you had to pay
long distance rates to call abroad
(five dollars I recall to buy a book
in Oxford once and thought it cheap)
but now everything is here.
That language on the notepad
is Slovenian, from a city
where dragons guard the river,
water is sacred, like language
but some find it easier to learn.
I wish Achilles had stayed in Thessaly,
he’d speak good Turkish now
or maybe even Bulgarian—
Helena was so happy here,
lovely she looked studying us
from up there on the parapet
as if the whole world
were in her hands. Stay home,
traveler! Turn your daggers
into tuning forks, to coin a phrase,
get all the instruments in tune,
sing it, play it, sing it louder,
drown out the actual
and your city will not fall.
This is what magic means,
and magic is all we have.
They read the wrong book
and the gate is gone.

                                     29 August 2020

You can tell I feel lonely,

at the port of embarkation
and no ship,
not even a passing cloud.

Africa is beyond reach,
and there are no islands,
remember, where types
like me can brash ashore.

If I got there at all
I would have to simper and smile
up the beach by night
and hope the terns don’t screech
to give my pilgrimage away.

You can see I have been there before,
the island of Anyone But Me.

But it’s time to leave
so I have to walk out on the sea
singing her name
who sent me.

Anyone can do it,
just linger in the image–
I walked across the Thames
to Lambeth once
dry-shod in an ordinary dream—

I felt a little fear
but not much now,
just the salty tang
of being where I shouldn’t be–
there is a kind of pleasure there,
you know how it is,
the window’s dirty
but the sky is clean.

Recall how the song began:
across the frozen Baltic
to the gates of Troy
on foot to free her
from winter…

something like that.
The land is nowhere near me ow–
I must be almost there.

(Epyllion they would have called this song, a little scrap of epic leading nowhere. But here we anywhere are.)

                                                           28 August 2020

Embroider me a coat
or just enough of one
to get my arms through
and tug over my head,
I feel the rough net
pull past my eyes
pageant of images,
round coins woven in
with pictures of gods and goddesses,
you know who they are,
pale houses and lush trees
and delicate diagrams
as if from the French
Republican calendar,
what day is today, spinach,
horseradish, scallop shell?

Give me all of these,
wrap me in pictures
I can live with, pictures
that teach me how to live,
pictures that live for me
while I sleep, my awkward
arms snug in the weaving,
my empty hands dreaming tools
to build the great work.
Thousands of images,
thousands of knots
you and you alone can
artfully knit in the cloth,
and get it done by morning,
so I wake in a new world.

                                                        27 August 2020

   is the feast of the obvious.

Say it out loud, let the sparkle

of sunlight twinkle on the gold

or plastic or wood or paper of it.

It’s here! What more can you ask?

Say it out loud, each thing is listening

waiting to learn the part

you want it to play

in this solemn mystery

of an ordinary day.

Be loud, be clear, call

the tree O tree and call the bird

any whistle you can manage,

lift your sweaty face

and kiss the sunlight.

All the room in the world

for fear and love, just

say it, don’t keep them waiting.

                                                      25 August 2020

Wind-argued linden.
we wait for one another
patient as Asia.

I told her in a letter:
you have as many arms,
as many hands
as you need, as long as you
have a tool for each one
to hold, to wield.

She didn’t answer,
she was thinking of those gods
in India with so many arms,
she thought I was calling her a god.
Or maybe treating her like a kid.

But the tree understood—
I could hear the wind in the leaves
explaining what I meant,
could hear the long bone of the trunk
assenting. Asserting.

I wrote again,
this time carrying on
about roses and sea birds,
piano lessons when I was eight,
the mountain tunnel through the Vosges.

This time she understood,
wrote: Tell me with things,
tell me with places,
don’t tell me what you think you know.

When I read her letter,
I felt bitter, they love
things more than they love me
I thought, natural enough.

But then the tree complained,
and I heard the leaves explaining:
sayings yes and saying no
are just saying, just saying,
her silence might be wiser
than her answer but how
would either of you ever know?

The leaves of the linden
are shaped like hearts
for good reasons. Every day
I get to hear their quick
sustained analysis
of the human situation,
this puzzled man
standing under their branches.

                                                   25 August 2020

                                                        for CJD
To the end of something
sticks a glistening caudal structure,
scaly with lights, and floating
towards a new beginning
necessarily.
                               This is a me,
an entity that comes to know
and know itself, slowly, longly,
over who knows what arc
of time experienced or otherwise
slept through with green leaves.

2.
Start-ups on all sides.
The politics of hiding in the trees
because they are there
before us and endure
our trespassing.
What do children think?
Whatever it is
they will do it all their lives
along the Mississippi of their grief.

3.
So cut and run.
Be for once
another kind of animal.
Revere the difference.
This is going you know
to wind up in church—
you pick the altar.
Or become it yourself.

4.
How slow this is
to get where it’s going!
That’s because it’s here
already, and you are
(as we used to say
in hide and seek), you are it.
It’s up to you to find
the god or goddess
hidden in the woods.
Or their word left over
in wood itself.
Hold a piece of it
up to your ear and hear.

5.
See, there’s an image.
A piece of wood.
None too clear. Taut maple,
easy pine, the text
won’t say. Just wood.
Hold it, hear it, let
it tell you what it is
and what it knows.

6.
When years ago I moved up here
from Asphalt Island
there were trees a-plenty.
And now there are so many more.
The density of the dendropolis
has grown more than even I
could have hoped with all my
over-the-top romantic wish.
The trees are many and men few.
I feel like an intruder as I walk
among them, reverent, and they
don’t seem to mind, some even
welcome me and tell me this and that,
I am not at liberty yet
to tell you all they tell.
But they do talk, they are kind to me,
I feel like a cat in a crowd of people,
tolerated, even liked by some,
allergen to others, a furry foreigner.
But no fur, just little me among
the gigantic trees, fifty foot oaks
and ninety foot tulipiferas.
This is what I’ve been getting at
all along—we are in the minority
on land, a bunch of noisy immigrants.
We would do well to take care
not to offend these innumerable elders.

7.
Hylonoetic:
everything that is or was
in any sense alive
has consciousness.
And everything with consciousness
can talk. And does talk.
And we can learn to hear.
Wood or metal,
carapace or bone,
winged or worm—
they all report.
Things think.
Matter sings.

8.
It’s the weekend now,
Sonnenschein und Wochende
the Germans sing
to the tune of Happy Days Are
Here Again, less sinister
than our election anthem.
Sunshine on the Weekend
they sing out, and weekend
means get ready to decide
just what kind of religion
suits your personal weather.
Sabbath or Sunday or some
darker name or brighter song,
Mass or minyan, mosque or
here we sit within our ancient
cavern in the mountainside
where thinking runs quietly
and goes as far as mind can go.

                                           August 2020

He kissed the leper
he tore off all his clothes
and ran naked,

wrote poems and never
became a priest,
never took vows,

wrote poems instead,
praised God in everything
everything he saw he said,

he said it with the sun
and with the wind, the rain,
and every word was praise.

Tore off his clothes
and went naked to the world
knowing God was all he needed

maybe the tunic that hangs
in that secret room at Assisi
is the very garment he threw off,

or maybe all the cloth
has blown away
and only the words remain,

he kissed the leper,
he stroked aloud
the petal of a roadside rose.

                                                     21 August 2020
(Of John Bernardone, whom they called Frenchy)

Memory
is a kind of lace
endless
intersections,
countless joinings,
endless gaps.

                            21.VIII.20

photos by Charlotte Mandell