ROBERT
KELLY

And what should we believe?
All the dreams
that rained down
so heavily all yesterday
seemed worth the mind
they flickered through.

Games rained out,
streams overflowing,
man playing the twin-
barreled reed aulos
to wild applause, how
we can sing two songs at once.

It’s all in the fingers
and the circle of breath.

2.
May Eve they called it,
that famous last night
that comes every year.
I sat in the car a while
sheltering, the rain
pelted on the roof,
atonal marimba as
the window fogged over
with my own breath
and I tried to believe.

3.
What is the meaning
of Walpurgisnacht?
It’s not all witches and weird.
It’s about suddenly
in darkness realizing
you are not alone,
are never alone, and all
things and all beings
around you have dreams
of their own. Schemes.
Bonfires and signal flares,
cell phones and Acropolis.

4.
Then daylight comes,
morning, the day itself
as footnote to the night.
And all the citizens
of the dark put on their
fresh new clothes
and sing in tune.

Get ready–it’s time for that radiant fantasy called now.

1 May 2023

The loveliest thing about writing
is you can’t tell where it’s going.
Even if you have your last line
firmly in mind, you can’t control
what the words get up to
along the way. Something always comes to mind between one word and the next, and after
every word a gap like a river–
who knows what they speak
over there, with that weird
flag flapping on a mound
you have no binoculars to help.

No, you have to cross the gap
all by yourself, bark out a word
and hold till it ferries you over
and dumps you in silence
halfway there so you have to
Flounder out and come ashore,
the mighty river was a trickle,
that flag a flutter in magnolia.

You’ve found the new word now
and weary though you may be
it will carry you to the next,
the next, the next. That’s all
I know about getting there.

10 April 2023

Then it began again,
the truth comes by weeks,
that’s what work is for,
the numbers press
0ur tender skin.

2.
But who is talking,
who dares to have
opinions about seven
or thirteen or nine
or even one? Is one
even a number or just
what is? We used to love
cowboy music, ‘cause cowboys
have no weeks or weekdays,
they just have cows, cowday
every day keeps numbers at bay
till a solitary horseman
herds them home.

3.
I think of what such music said,
but I haven’t heard it for years
and I haven’t even seen a cow
since two days ago, soft brown
Jersey, in the Churchtown barn,

4
In fact you saw the cow, whole
barn full of them, you told me, I took your word for it.
O Monday is a prairie spread
deep into a shimmering horizon
and I woke with no numbers
in my head at all but only
now they come toppling in,
bales of hay, tumbleweed.

10 April 2023

And so we stood
alone in the rain
on the broad piazza
in front of the temple,
bronze horses on the roof.
Though we were married
it married us again
to be there, the Adriatic
lapping at the stone,
we couldn’t hear tt
but we could feel it,
the way you hear music
when somebody says Bach.
Then we went back
to the suburbs, friend’s house,
human insistence on the small.
Thank God for little things,
Tiny communion wafer—
we call it Bread
and see in the mind’s eye
a great brown loaf
that feeds our billions
if we consent to eat.

Suburbs like Old Mill in Brooklyn,
I was shocked, little canal, scattered brick cottages
in empty fields—my childhood suddenly was all around me
and speaking Italian too.
Though not the dialects I heard,
chopped off vowels of Sicilian,
but the water smelled the same.

2.
So why does anybody get married?
Because a place is most real
when you’re together. Shades
deeper, bricks firmer, rain
refreshing, all the playful
teasing of the actual.
Of course it has to be Venice,
the clitoris of Europe,
there in the crowds before
San Marco or the white beauty
of Santa Maria della Salute
where we stood all alone
on the stone that holds the sea.

Of course be married–
how else can you know
what’s really there
without another self to tell you?

3.
Grey but no rain
here today
and mild enough
to coax the forsythia
I need for Friday,
my mother’s birthday.

Venice is just a beautiful
excuse for talking
about marriage,
talking always about love.
It is, I suddenly remember,
the city solemnly married the sea
in the days of the Doges.
And now it’s for us to do it,
hand in hand on the marble prow
we do what we can,
the purest way we can, heal
the world by being in it together.

5 April 2023

LESSON PLAN

Let me tell you what to do.
I speak with confidence
because I don’t know
anything but the sound of words.
Music is enough for both of us.

2.
Or if you doubt my bona fides
(rhymes with Fridays as we say
those lucky days in Brooklyn)
((lucky: work is done, lust is in))
then try to honor ancestry:
I was born of humans on planet Earth.

3.
As I was saying—
This is what you have to do:
Take every word you hear
as gospel truth.
Accept it, smile, take
down another book and open it.
Every religion says the same:
It’s all up to you.

4.
But we were speaking of
what I want to tell you,
instructions that should last you
all the way to the end of today
when the golden sun sinks
beneath the greening horizon
and another truth comes along,
just as true but much darker,
rub your hands and sing along.

5.
There, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you: sing along,
muzzle your skeptic twitches
and sing along with what comes.
Don’t make me say it all again,
sing along, sing along,
it’s the magic way of listening.

4 April 2023

A cup is reverence
taken to the lip.
Full or less or empty even
it is a tiny sacrament of love
accepting love, cold glass
or hot porcelain, the calm
vocabulary of ecstasy.

3 April 2023

THE DOOR AGAIN

opens. Light
lets itself in.
And what more?
I wrote the saga
of the opening door,
who or what
dared to come in
or stood there
and just stared
or glanced through
and walked away.

2.
I still sit here
stunned by these variations
possible, stunned
and scared when I remember
the terrifying two-way passage
a door allows, encourages even,
tempts me to be gone
from this place into the sci-fi
land of Out, where they
are waiting, a letter in their hands.

3.
I went there once,
raindrops on the windshield,
bare trees shimmered green.
We drove towards town,
two deer at roadside,
an eagle over. Red-tailed hawk
on a branch watching.
Could this be real?
Is this what a door does
when you listen to the charm
of its softly swaying music
and go through?
We bought bread and eggs
then Hurry home Hurry home
the brick wall said, Pray you have
a key to your own glad door.

3 April 2023

The glamour lives inside.
A Gaelic word I think,
the spell something seen
casts on the eye of the seer.
Something like that.
We live in witchcraft
though we know it not.
And witches are often
the kindest people, relieve
the tedium of the norm
with spectacular displays
of you’ve-never-seen-anything
like-this before. Shimmer
and shake, sole and slippery,
flies past too fast to focus on,
wraps round you soft as paisley.
Glamor. Gladness of the actual
seen for the first time clear.

2 April 2023

The ointments,
the oils called essential
because they bear
the essences of their origin,
flower, sap, wounded tree
or musk of beast, and these
she brings to such a quiet desk
and writes with them
into tiny vials or just dabs
some on her wrist and raises
it to me sometimes
so I can read it too
the essences interwoven
in a new odor never before
smelled in this green world–
her magic of weaving
ancient ointments into
the utterly fresh and new.
You see why I call what
she does writing–and each
new scent deserves a name
and sometimes hours later
it will say itself in a dark room.

1 April 2023

Sanctuary, symmetry,
the woman brought
the mountain home with her
the way they do,

the way they do,
geology is one long song.
we learn to sing it
not just with our legs,
clouds explain canyons,
the lake explains the sky,

deep strata of uncounted years
specify this rock wall,
anticline by river, road
a blasphemy through solid rock.

2.
She brought the mountain home
and held it on her knee,

take care of things
the crows kept saying, the way
they do to wake us, make us
do the right thing,

now wake
the stone they cawed
and she did. So quiet
for so hard a thing it spoke,
said its name, said clear
soft things about sleep and time
and who am I and who are you
before she let it fall sleep again–
its long work not nearly done.

1 April 2023