ROBERT
KELLY

This kind of bird
can come straight from the sky
and pass through glass
and bring its beak to you.
Nothing shatters except
someplace in you you thought
was all your own. But now
the bird has come, small as a dove,
sort of white like last week’s snow,
and after one painful introduction
has taken up residence in you.
Your tenant from the sky.
You can feel the wings rustling,
hear its soft cooing sometimes
when your head is on the pillow
teaching you both the path
to the other side of sleep.

4 February 2021

I did not let the word
sink all the way in,
I covered the page too soon.
Now I wander around
thirsty for the rest of it,
all through this tree town,
Dendropolis, looking up,
looking down, watching
the gutters gushing with
the crystal clear waters
of what the word meant.

4 February 2021

I had no dreams last night
so have nothing to report
except the weather

yet I’ve never been able
to chant with all the intelligent
reverence it deserves
the uncanny mystery of snow.
So what shall we talk about now?

Somehow we are children
still in the nursery
and every thing we see
is a window onto something else.

There, that’s something said,
something transcendent.
Never doubt the word that comes.
It is the portal of the temple,
open door to love’s boudoir.

1 February 2021

I thought I was there enough to be here,
thought the sky was free
to fly in if I could fly,
I thought the flowers at my feet
had me in mind
then it all, I all, changed—
why did you make me grow up?

I didn’t know how to answer the child
or whatever he was,
I was silent but looked serious
as much as I could make my face look
to show him that I cared, at least,
even if I had no answer,
didn’t even understand his question.

Then he shouted:
Why did you grow me up?
His voice had the child’s shrill
hidden in the man’s timbre.

I wanted to calm him
or make him less unhappy,
so I mumbled something about
how I had no choice,
we happen to each other,
can’t help it, things happen.

Then, more calmly but no less sternly
he explained: Things
do not just happen.
We happen them.

Yes, I cried in turn,
we happen them and they happen us,
the snowdrops at your feet
really do mean you,
the sky is waiting for your consent,
then we can both fly.

Yes, he said, you’re right.
But where will we go?
Where will we go?

25 January 2021

midmorning
color of the trees
changing vowels
in the middle of the word
mean what the sound says
for a change
but the old-fashioned wire
still stretches
from sender to receiver
just like any sky
blue when She is yellow
otherwise otherwise.

2.
Gravamen, the bedrock
meaning of what you mean
that’s what the day
insists on hearing—
tune your tubes accordingly,
the hollow hurry of your breath,
leave your damned lute unpluck’t
and shout your song.

3.
But how.
Moo-cow on the meadow
baa-lamb in the byre.
Be young. Younger.
Babies howl, children whimper,
adolescents sulk.
Get loud. The cloud
is waiting to part
at your command.

4.
I tell you these bold moves
but mouse along myself.
That’s what comes of knowing Latin,
reading books, watching women
slyly from the corner of the missal,
eating oats for breakfast,
being Irish and other lies.
I don’t have the chutzpah to be real,
I slink along in shadowland
murmuring my dialects
but at least I leave you hints
along the way. This way.

5.
Why can’t this be
a long poem about the Nile
from mountain Africa
a land so flat they had to build
a pyramid to touch the sun.
Why can’t this flow
long and natural and gleaming
full of interesting dangers
crocodiles and princesses
fetching Moses from the stream.
Or did she hide him there herself,
this little Lenin of the pharaohs
who led the workers
dryfoot through the image of the sea
always looking for the truest mountain?

6.
See how soon I forgot the river
green and silky
just as much here as anywhere–
you know I’m still talking about vowels,
what else is there ever to say?
Love hovers like a dove above—
all resemblances are dangerous and true.

24 January 2021

Dig in.
               The gods are watching
from inside the stone.
Waiting for you
to give them faces,
bodies, maybe even names.

This is your job,
you were born here
shoeless and shivering
to do this kind of work
only you can do.

                                     Dig in
just far enough to work them free.
They will not thank you
in particular but they will be.
And when they are, all sorts of things
become possible—living,
going, even loving.

But that comes later. Dig
the image out of what just seems,
out of what you see.
It is so hard to see
what is really there.
That’s where digging comes in,
the hands find what the eyes miss

and there they are
in all their hidden glory,
out in the world again,
ready to free you who set them free.

17 January 2021