Nov 10, 2013 | Uncategorized
Carve silence, churl, carve
absence into aroma
you don’t miss their faces you miss their sheen
ælfscin
or aura, the light around one
that makes her who or him she is,
elf-shine the preter-human shown,
faërie folk are what we must become,
elves are not some belated ancient lingerers
they are our future selves
keen wise dangerous and rife with pleasures
we catch a glimpse of them sometimes
when the moon or noon be right
and the shadow falls
they are we will be
and till then be quiet, read your tree.
Sep 24, 2013 | Uncategorized
As soon as it comes home
it will be me
again or for the first time
who can decide
out here where the trees
publish so many
variations on the same news
the way we music.
Sep 20, 2013 | Uncategorized
This gentle clack of billiard balls on the green felt behind me makes me think of the endless rolling and occasional collisions of asteroids, spread out along the ecliptic mostly, or rogues in free space tumbling along rebel orbits of their own. We pass unscathed through their geometries. Or do we? Do those bodies too (as the ancients surmised about the canonical planets) cast influences our way, subtle shifts of love and aversion and indifference, so that by them also our moods (those vagrant beasts who live our lives for us) are shaped?
Sep 11, 2013 | Uncategorized
The opera of the faraway
like a Victorian children’s book
I hear voices inside the word
of old adventurers, their lions,
glaciers, killer whales,
the green of Shalimar
blood-spattered as with roses,
the opera of all we never knew
here in our trembling hands.
Sep 8, 2013 | Uncategorized
Robert Kelly reads at T/Space, the art space of architect Steven Holl, in Rhinebeck NY, 7 September 2013
Sep 5, 2013 | Uncategorized
The flirtations of Zeus
have no boundary.
Lightning runs down the solitary tree,
fire loves the wood of it
we think, but in truth
fire loves this secret water
deep inside each thing.
The water hidden
in the crystals of steel,
water in the wood, sap rising
to meet Jupiter rushing down
to the water in us.
II.
That is Zeus.
Makes girls and boys out of everything
his power makes us who we are
as once on Helicon
he seemed to take a fancy
to a chubby little shepherd
ripe on the altar of puberty and
rushed down from heaven
to plant one scorching kiss on those rude lips
so ever after that young swain made
song whenever he tried to speak
so his plainest hello could
thrill the hearts of all the shepherdesses,
Genesis of poetry.
III.
“the swan was before we were married”
says Jove to Juno in Offenbach’s Orphée aux
Enfers
history changes day by day —
no one knows what comes before
because feeling is always and only right now
and history has no heart to feel.
The Swan also is tomorrow.
IV.
Was there even time to answer them
before the air came down
— who made the air? —
to lock our snug atmosphere around us
safe so we could breathe?
But we weren’t we yet,
we had to get born from crystals of air
— why a man has a chip of ice
deep in his every heart —
and learned to wrap a silk of skin
A net of blood to carry it.
It’s a guess
to call our father’s name.
Zeus gave us the weather,
ta metarsia
so let us praise Zeus.
Dia. Accusative case of God.
It’s time for me to start
reading every book again.
For him if not for me.
V.
Me, I look out the window
I see the air.
What can be wrong with me
that I can see the air?
The outside calls
to the inside,
air inside me too
solemn as Tennyson
blood-journeying oxygen,
caravaning its way through the frail brain.
My hungry eyes, my hungry eyes.
VI.
Hymn to Zeus.
He sees us when he looks down
when we do something
worth his notice,
some offering or some public iniquity—
the beauty of Zeus is this:
he does not know what we’re thinking.
And all the forms Zeus takes
rejuvenate the human race —
the swan of our grace, the gold
in the mercy of our eyes,
our eagle wit — he pours
the beast-god stuff in,
our genome rises to adore.
Jul 28, 2013 | Uncategorized
Build a bridge under
water
the beauty of its
structure
— stone, wood, I. K.
Brunel’s red iron —
improves the sea.
2.
For we were brought
here to define
give name and shapes
to natural things
and teach them
manners.
3.
Or we were born for
this
from seafoam and
crucifixion
to work out of pain
a frail beauty
that teaches
somewhere else
a beauty lasts.
Jul 28, 2013 | Uncategorized
Try to tell the
weather
what to do.
Use ancient difficult
words
it might remember
from when it was
young
and played with
Zoroaster
on Europe’s highest
mountain
or do I need
a darker
animal than that?
Jul 24, 2013 | Uncategorized
Hide me from myself
where No One finds me
your drunken daughter
your god-crazed son
then I will learn
how to answer the rain
in its own language
give lessons to the rose.
Till then I’m just in the way
of everything I really mean.
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