ROBERT
KELLY

The year begins to speak to me
quietly as my own breath—
have I confused myself
with what’s around me?
Am I just the time of things again?
Whatever the word is,
the year is speaking.
Young winter, mild sky.
Everything is prophecy.

2.
I begin to feel again
like the self you know.
And I am here for you,
so at least I have shown
up for work on time—
that’s the good kind of year.

3.
He swept away liturgy
he rolled away the stone.
Come in and sit down
in the dark and know your mind
he said and then come out again
and make the world happy
one by one.

4.
I think of that now,
the calm of the inner room
where we learn to be
and do something useful
with our being. And what
a wonder is a simple door.

5.
Mystery is a white tree
up the road,
a road is a riddle.
So many friends have
walked into the sky,
amazing how their voices linger
or I feel them almost at my fingertips.
Tree on a hill,
sky hidden in the sky.

6.
If you’re so smart, she said,
you could dance in your dreams
where feet are nimble
and syllables count themselves
up and down the famous steps
the Viennese set such store on.
By now she’s lost me, I’m stuck
yet again trying to find a name.
A name not mine. Or not mine yet.

7.
When it comes
it will sound at first
like language
then as you listen longer
it will seem music
and finally silence.
But your hands feel
as if there’s something
firm and clean in them,
an oval lapis perhaps
or a flower bulb but
you look down and they’re empty.
But the word has been spoken.

2 January 2021

When the words were free
the child picked them up
sucked on them, hid them
in his cheeks beside his teeth,
breathed into them and hoped.
Do you remember hope?
That this word you rolled
around in your mouth could be
something outside, someone
who could come talk to you?
Nobody talks to children, remember?
Years later there’s a little
plowed snow beside the road
here and there, most of it melted.
Even at year’s end the grass
is faintly green, at least not any
other color would describe it.
Remember color?
Remember describing
things to people who look at you
with pity or amusement as you try
to say what you have seen?
And you had only the words.
Everything else was locked up outside
in other people’s lives,
houses, churches, cars.
There is so much to remember.
So much to say, the words
still soft in your mouth.

Best wishes for the New Year
                          2021
from Robert & Charlotte Kelly

1.
A transparent banner
floats above a peaceful field,
no controversy in the stone.
She runs outside to give
the kids a treat, her hands
full of night and day, water
tumbling in the cleft.
These are my politics.

2.
Grey day, road tree and sky
the same no color. Up to us
to bring religion in again,
light the candle, rouge the lips.

3.
It’s all about money
this government stuff,
we all know that
so let’s think about something
else instead, music, say,
or where I left my wallet
last night, or who was
Robin Hood really, and could
you do all that with an arrow?

4.
The litmus of morning
specifies the mind.
I am identified—the window
recognizes my right to see.
For all I know I could be me. 

5.
Brave as a drunkard
I wave the flag again,
no sign on me, no dream
to clutter my clarity.
Yes, I say, why not?

6.
Don’t be cynical,
there are aunts in the parlor,
Rose and Sarah,
Uncle Seymour, cousin Norman,
they’ve been around a long while
and know what I can only
hope to guess.
Something missing in me,
I can never be them.

7.
Sky gets lighter
gets the earth darker.
8 A.M. if anybody wants to know,
this is a love song,
how could it not be,
you being so beautiful
and I lonely as a monk’s
hand holding his rosary.
One day after another
and each one counts as prayer.

8.
Dear Diana
you spread your arms
over the city,
you let us read
the lines in your palm
as if they show our fate too,
our nature I mean
and the birds fly by
and the rain sweeps your image
but you do not relent,
you keep your arms wide open,
welcoming, offering
the single gesture that will save us all
if we could learn to do it too,
come to my arms, read my hands.

9.
By now my flag
is smudged a little
with beliefs.
Still dim enough
to keep headlights on.
Time is a box
we unpack at our leisure—
call it ‘art’ to be obvious,
or Scarlatti on the cellphone
or the big creek at Wanatanka
pouring into the river,
wide, wide, I seem to sob
seeing it, remembering the sea.

30 November 2020

It said so in the sleep
but who was listening,
who can testify

and who was sleeping?
The radical explanation
is usually the best—

ink blot, gunshot, howl?
She thought she heard an owl
and why not, night,

night has its way with us,
voices and forgetting,
creaking stairs, the moon.

I’m trying to remember,
that’s all, so much gets lost
in the algorithms of lust,

fear, shivering under the sheet.
What did who say when,
twisted branches of context,

not one word remains.
How am I to understand
the sun if I lost the dark,

am I to make do with light
and air and food like
any animal? Animule

my father used to say,
he taught me the haughtiness
of play, play till all the meanings

rub away and leave you free
again, he taught me silence
is the deepest conversation.

29 November 2020

In the oceanography
of time we are the third
island from the core

we stole the land
from the In-digenes
who were always
here before us,
we called them In-dians
because we were from outside
or called them natives
because they were born here
and we haven’t been born yet.

2.
Who are we who stumbled
on this archipelago,
rafting across the great silence,
riding the cosmic rays
desperate to find
a mirror to gaze into
that would shows us our faces,
tell us who we are.

3.
I think we are the fetal mind
of what one day will be
the true humanity, sometimes
you hear our heartbeat
soft in the noise of all that happens.
Christ and Buddha showed the way
to what might yet become—
but we storybook’d the one
and killed the other though on
the third day he rose again
into us ever after, hear him?
or is that just my heart beating? 

4.
So who on earth
are we? Children
maybe, because
we keep asking questions,
good children if we do,
or bad if we think we know the answers
and insist. Be quiet,
little one, we say to ourselves
when we should say Shout
your questions,
the night is waiting for them,
each night a different
answer and we live.

27 November 2020

Imagination is made of trees,
old cars and girls on skis,
bungalows and crocodiles
and every now and then one
word or two that rises from
the sacred compost of sleep,
silence from which we rise,
clumsy flowers with one perfect leaf.

26 November 2020