ROBERT
KELLY

Whiffletree
sky dark
wagon full of beets

*

it could be Jordan
shallow sluice
cool to my ankles
stood on sun-bleached stones

*
everything is next
nothing is now
can’t help crying
*
child means
water still tastes good

*
nothing comes to mind
o I get it
the trees are still asleep

*
they dream
or drink
the morning sun

*
never talked to them
they talked to me–
am I still like that?

*
the moment came
the black cow
turned and looked at me

*
taste of milkweed sap
forbidden
always risk of knowing

*
scrupulous churches
why so many, people
only one priest

trees tuning up
waiting for the lifted arm
of our attention.

Raindrops passing slow,
neums of an older music,
people walking on the road,

or are we part of the chorus
only, this language business
so full and florid on our lips,
did somebody else say
what I think I’m singing?

Where trees outnumber people
logic, exhausted, sleeps
a galaxy apart. It’s raining,
sort of, or as Jack Spicer
would say, Believe the rain.

Means listen to it
as to the trees
the white cars passing
boys on the playground,
breath in your windpipe,
listen with your heart wide open,
sacred story stretched out
on the ground, the song we share.

the irises by the Jacuzzi,
we love you
for the way you talk,
you teach us
not to trust weather,
even be skeptical of stones,
are you always California?
Ease open the dark knot-work of morning clouds,
I think that’s what you told me,
let the rain out,
the multitudinous
element in us,
But then I was a child,
stood beside the window box, pansies,
leaned back against
damp cinderblock garage.
Hurt no tree,
take care of me.
And the stone lips, hips, of Phryne
posed as Aphrodite,
yes, yes, see the gods
in our friends,
Olympus is the body of the other,
where all deities abide.

2.
I haven’t said a word all day
so don’t know who I am.
You know the rule,
You are what you speak.
The cinderblocks
were like rainclouds,
Genghis Khan
drove his warriors
over the pages of my book,
the roses were just beginning.
Watch my fingers as I talk.

3.
Wine poured over the piazzas,
something being
celebrated,
a horse or a homecoming,
tables spread,
old man shouting over the fiddlers

We spill the milk
of herself the Sun!
We all of us together
are Her one child!

What a neighborhood
to grow up in,
satin blouses,
the mass in Latin.

4.
More to come.
Insert weather here.
The Weimar Republic
has a way of persisting
and we know what comes from that.
Try again. J’accuse. Leave
the fascist envelope
unopened.
Letter litter,
walk it to the dumpster,
come back and sniff
evening settle on the lawn.
Some laws are absolute.
Now help me rise.

The pebbles on Church’s Beach
all point across the bay
to the mainland, America,
insofar as round things
can point anywhere. Mostly
round. Worn by tide, time,
friction, glacial enterprise,
all the usual suspects. Last night
I learned how to unwrap
cough drops from their twisted
paper. Paper is supposed to be
just for writing on. Cellophane
was made for secular occasions,
paper for sacred. Writing
manifestos, wiping the body,
dabbing tears from lovers’ eyes,
all the holy things. The beauty
of pebbles is they do all our
counting for us–no numbers needed,
the beach accepts the sea.
The vacant lot across the street
possessed a deep declivity
as if an old foundation planned,
just deep enough for us
on snowy days to sled down
not far but fun, micro-alpine
pleasures in the city, or more
truly towards the city’s edge–
we had the last candy store
before the marshes on the sea.
The way pebbles roll.
This is the enactment of the play
the characters asleep in the script,
the actors relaxing in the room
they call Eden, innocence and wine
until cast out into the next act
and whoever they are vanishes
into whomever they must be.
Become. Please keep listening.
You hear the pebbles rolling
down the sidewalk, one of them
caught in your sneaker, digit
on a digit, don’t count, get it out–
you are suzerain of your shoes.
Banish interlopers, those numbers
from the banker’s bench, those
guesstimates of lethal sciences,
silence, look at the sea.
That’s Massachusetts over there
and Rhode Island in your left hand,
life of danger, merry-go-round
in Rockaway, hear the music,
calliope knows best, rub two
between your palms, pebbles,
and feel the rhythm of creation–
do we create what we behold?
The bus stops across the street,
the subway five blocks away,
see what life is like?
We are children of the distances,
no mama but the waking light,
day is here, go do it all again.
Stone by stone it signifies.
But you have to read it—that’s
the hard part. Here, let me
show you how. Ox. House. Camel.
Door. Window. Man asleep
on a blanket on the floor.
The alphabet holds us together
pebble by pebble. As many
as it takes to fill up a figure
irregular in shape, a hip or a
hummock on a hillslope, how
can we measure the inner
meanings of what we see?
We see curved space with straight
line eyes—that is our religion
from the start, Karahan, Jerusalem.
Hold firm, a generous hand often
has gaps between the fingers—
through those pebbles tend to fall
you end up with fewer stones now
than you thought, but did you ever
count them? Not then, not now,
it’s still New Bedford over there,
the best ice cream on Ile-St-Louis,
pebbles, always more pebbles
until the mind is done. Exalted
over the plain, smiling like lavender
on the slopes by Cavaillon, river
after river until the word is said.
Even then it’s hard to hear—
imagine Aeneas trudging upstream
on foot for once, boat and sea
far behind him, us I mean, imagine
the long walk to get where we are.
Aren’t we refugees from a lost city,
pebbles in our pockets, there must
be a place up ahead, place for us,
stones too yearn to come home.

The weather walks away.
Another century
meant something else,
the sway of beast back
sloping through the field
but we, ah we
are abstract materialists,
we chant silently,
carry images of images
softly from now to then.
And then is very far.

2.
Subs have periscopes
but what have we?
The weather only
hints at what’s around us,
what’s to come.
And when the weather walks away
we sit indoors, transcribing
ignorance into interesting books.

3.
Century after century.
I was a Roman augur once,
haruspex, bird flight,
not very good at it but still
it was a job, and every day,
weather has no weeks,
the birds keep coming back.

4.
In the tile rooves of Provence
the dormice live, little
animals called ‘sleepers’
harmless as a beast dare be.
And in thatched rooves
even more at home.
And where do we sleep
at peace, beneath which roofs?
I like the old word best,
makes me feel young again–
in Brooklyn we had rooves when I grew up.

5.
Enough geography.
It’s Christ Mass day
(speaking of old words)
and the spell-checker
gives me a hard time.
I want the word the way it was
when He was still in it
and we could hear it,
if not His name at least
the adjective they knew Him by.

6.
Because language is our weather.
The storms of it release
sometimes a simple day,
call it whatever you like,
a quiet now tucked inside
the rush of onward. A word.
Maybe somebody’s true name.
But I would never tell.

7.
Noon on Christmas day.
The snow has melted.
The rams and ewes
and lambs and wethers
are safe snug over the hill.
The Magi have come and gone,
a hint of frankincense
left in their wake. Or is it myrrh
from a new-endangered tree?
Or is it the air itself?
Slowly the light is coming back.

1.
Everything nearby.
Aeneas on the river
moving inland
past the white swine,
a sign. We have brought
so little with us
yet everything is here.
The story holds your hand.

2.
Breccia, yes? And a frozen pond.
Mild winter bur in the shallows
some. We lost our countries
and found this. Who invented
slavery? The Greeks had it,
takes so long to lose it. Even now.

3.
Imagine a monk
in dark red robe.
He lets the color
rise up inside him
till he feels a quiet
fervent love
for everyone.
Color is a prayer.

4.
Not the site of Rome
but upstream a little
He came and saw
and left the place alone.
A woman lived there,
ancestor of the man next door.
You hear his car start up
most mornings. You wonder
how much of who he is he knows.

5.
Millennia, that’s what it means,
three thousand years in Italy.
You see him in his backyard,
wears moccasins just like you.
I know so much I can’t say a word.

1.
Empty head a harp
still, lets
the wind of what
happens sing.

2.
Turns out everything
is an answer.
Now locate the question.
This is religion.

3.
Stood by the stream
across the street just
a few moments when
someone also stopped
and we talked. It seemed
too natural, made me wonder
am I part of what flows?

4.
I keep telling my friends
Don’t think. Let it
think you. Aristotle
frowns at me but Aquinas understands.

5.
Once there was another country
and we all came from there.
It wasn’t so long ago but we forget
and make up long stories about
imaginary places like England,
Italy, China, Ireland, Africa.
Maybe it helps us put up
with where we think we are.

6.
Just as in one of those places
the harp sings by itself.
Or to put it a southern way
the ancestors sing through us.
Either way, the song
comes to meet us
and we call it morning.
14.X.21

under glass
the way the mind
spreads out
what it has seen.

2.
So much left to say,
it needs an anthology of mornings
to get even part of the message across.

3.
Across the Great Divide
twixt thee and me.
How’s that for music
when you weren’t looking?

4.
It is a kind of rapture,
silent, that then eases
into speech. Not many
but few as they are
more than enough.

5.
When you look into a mirror
you condemn yourself to a journey.
It begins and begins
before you know it
you’re on the road,
no grammar to guide you.

6.
Certain Irish monks
were banished from empty Iceland
when the Vikings arrived.
They traveled ever further west,
came to America, said
We will leave this land in peace.

7.
That’s the nice part of the story.
After that you don’t much want
your children to hear. But they must,
they must understand
what you have done. We have done.

8.
When you have a chance
lift the glass carefully,
let the musty smell out
and maybe a bird or two,
crow if you’re lucky.
Now let the knowledge
rest a while in light and air,
you go on about your business
while it breathes.

9.
That’s how to deal with the truth,
let it say itself in all its ways.
Getting light out now,
someone taking off their shirt.

10.
We must say it
say it again
in the current state
of luggage, o language
is the final law,
it means what we say.

15 October 2021

The empty air
was inside him now
and sleep a half-
remembered folk song
from a far-off tribe,
the mysterious Awake.

2.
What to do
with all this music?
Hang by a thread
then cut the thread?

3.
Nyet. No good.
The dark no comfort.
The glass teeters on the edge.
Yesterday afternoon
a plate fell and did not break.
Hold onto that.
Still hope in the hands.

4.
Sleep elusive maiden
in this wood with so few trees,
all her names
shadows of the still unfallen leaves.

5.
We can close our eyes
but not our ears.
But he has eyes in the mind
he cannot close.
Listen to the dark, then,
brother, the sneers of sleep.

11 October 2021

The mist has lifted.
Only in the highest leaves
lingers. The registers
of human speech
define our atmosphere.

2.
We understand the speaker
better when we see the kind of tree
that grows inside.

3.
Eager for conviction,
she listens with her whole body,
reminds us of a stream,
freshet from the hills
washing her with words.

4.
But who is speaking?
There’s a little book of mine
came out only in German
called Wer spricht?, means
Who is Speaking. Still want to know.

5.
These episodes of understanding
come like monarch butterflies,
dozens of them
and then none,
while they’re off
multiplying in Mexico.

6.
Get it straight:
the pool cue
is not a fountain pen.
It doesn’t mean a thing
if it doesn’t leave a trace.

7.
And so we met
off Harvard Square,
brunch at the Basque restaurant
and talked high poesy.
It was almost like being alive
but not quite. But I could see
the shores of pure Being
over the messy waves of chat.

8.
So close now
to Another Thing.
What could it be
that sings to me.
Sometimes it takes
the form of pain,
leg or shoulder,
wrist or brow,
sense works hard
to music us
and sometimes it hurts.
Sometimes you wake up in the dark.

9.
Remember how we started,
pebble on a beach,
changes color when it’s wet.
Slips into any pocket,
any ear can hear this word.

7 October 2021