ROBERT
KELLY

Heard nothing
but it was waiting
patient as color
enduring the changes
in the light that made it.
A wall is like that,
even with its impatient door.

2.
So much to tell you.
Sleek haunches of the naiads
slipping through brightness,
yet you’d expect to hear
the slishing merriment
(if that’s not too fancy)
as they pass, water always
answers out loud
even the quietest gesture.

3.
Other things too I think
you ought to know
that I know about you,
we are not night
to each other
even though we do
have so many hands.

4.
Palm trees, royal,
on the esplanade
above the sea
in Santa Monica,
for example. I know
how urgent they were for you,
how many nights you stood
close as you could to one,
facing the tall houses,
pretending the sea was not there,
right there, behind you.
The little blasphemies of adolescence
trickled down your cheeks,
wanting the many and not the one.

5.
I know about such things.
We name our cities for them
and then forget. She brought
her son to the new God
who gave him all the rest.
That story. Always by the sea.
When you tried to turn
into our meager many-world
I felt myself at your side
trying to turn you back
to face the sea. My sea.
You won’t remember this
until it says so. Words
work that way. Your body
remembers for you.

6.
Still heard nothing.
Bird seed a-plenty on the lawn,
on the branch. Wait.
I’m used to waiting.
What else is time for?

7.
Let me be precise.
We stand in the forest
and think about the sea
out loud in words still green
or starting to turn gold.
Old. We are one thing
and want another.
                                         How dare
people lean to swim—
it amazes me still,
as if codfish came out
and shouted sermons on the sand.
But you know best,
some people have naiad in them
while I’m still trying to learn
how live in air. All this
is the mystery of breath.

8.
I think I’m starting to hear
something, a thin sound like a letter
slipping into the mailbox.
Slim sound. Sly sound.
Soft as the sky and now gone,
silence again.
When you get a chance
go to the museum, a big one,
and listen to the colors on the wall,
they call them paintings but so what,
they’re colors for us, and tell us
what they think we ought to know.
The way I know so much about you
and you know about me
though you don’t know you know.
Stand in the gallery
and read one color at a time
all around the walls,
una alla volta, don’t they say,
one thing at a time, one word
until the next color speaks.
Forget the images—an image
is just a sudden hand
on your shoulder, soft
finger on the nape of your neck.

9.
And that’s where all our travel brings us,
a place where we can make up
another person’s memories

and give them back, a place
where colors shimmer and swimmers
shiver as they come up for air,

a place where cities even
stretch out their arms to the sea,
houses are romantic by nature,

architecture is two-thirds sentiment,
we know so much about each other,
so I keep telling you more and more.

27 October 2020

All these years later
the same is true.
The same is always true;
We rush from room to room
forgetting that a door
is still a door, and further out
is also somehow further in.

2.
It began with something said
or written down
half a life ago just now.
Shotguns in the woods at dawn.

3.
The other thing was early,
early thing a word
scooped out of time
I had to run with to get to now.
Deadly pellets hurtle through the air—
how can we escape what we remember?

4.
Pale trees of morning,
bless me with your calm.
I have been again so long,
nameless shameless peace
of the old slow road. There,
not every door is visible.
Not every room has walls. 

5.
Morning feels better
when the dream has been said.
That must be how language
really began so you could tell
another what only you had seen,
seen in dream, and done, and learned,
the wake world can make do
with pointing and shouting. 

6.
I feel better already.
A cup of coffee, French mocha,
sings like Gurnemanz,
wise, leading me through
all the distances to now.

Everyone is Parsifal, of course—
that’s the point of music:
everything is happening to you,
you in particular, no matter
how many might be listening.
Only you go through those doors.
Only you can go out all the way in.

7.
Awake now
I taste it
on my tongue,
I mean the one
that licks
at what I see
curls softly
round what I
only remember.

8.
But such remembering!
Rings of Saturn,
rungs of Romeo’s ladder,
crinkly letters
folded in a dresser drawer,
kisses, chestnuts,
the surf at Church’s Beach
cresting gently on your ankles.
Here I am again. Are you ready?

25 October 2020

That’s not what mother
taught me language for,
complaining; explaining
is a little better, but making
things up is what really counts,
stories and theories and little lies.

2.
The middle of the night
is someone else.
You know her well,
you have heard often enough
her hands smooth down the cloth,
a small sound like far away
birds in autumn leaves,
sometimes you’ve even heard
her breath forming a word
or two in your mouth.
Say it. The dark is waiting.

22 October 2020

Witches worry us.
The conversation
goes on inside, core,
fruit inside the rind.
Peeled away, the word
comes out, orange
in autumn sunlight, yes.
But we worry.
And why not? The juice
of what we fear
is somehow sweet: ask
any child if they’d rather
meet a wizard or a priest.
Somehow all our many lives
harvest is the time of fruit and hear.

2.
Rheostat, regulate
the flow. I slept
too soundly
to have anything to say.

3.
But dreamt about faux-amis,
words that mean something
other than what we mean
when we pronounce them,
write them down, whisper
them to someone else. False
friends, it means, and maybe
the dream meant them too
but made me think it
was all about grammar
not about grief.

4.
The pallor of things known
compared to the somber
colors of the guessed-at—
children love that, dressing
up means lots of color,
even that blaring white
more shocking than scarlet.
Color what you know
with what you don’t!
Saturate the senses
with loud maybes,
call it dressing up for Halloween.

5.
Sun on Rainday
uh-oh.
Have I betrayed
the calendar again.
Or is it waiting,
my big glass of water,
out and up
beyond the conscious trees?

6.
We can find fear
in the meagerest evidence,
shadow of the witch’s hat
falls across what we are reading,
her cat rubs by our ankles,
her warlock husband growls
from every passing car.
                                                 She herself
is hidden, though, so deep
inside us we will never see.

19 October 2020

Sometimes it’s worth
walking there
with a word on your wrist
like a falcon
you hunt with, ready
to fly off any moment
and seize up there
(where? where
is it hiding
in the broad sky?)
the thing you mean.

The walking matters—
your movement
animates the word.
Muscle has meaning–
to move is to mean.

18 October 2020

Walk through the trees
to know
the burden of identity.
Blue to be a bird,
and then the yellow falls
from sun sky to be green
and you know all the rest.
But not my name.
The names are hard.

2.
Given the color and the shape
you reach for a book.
Given a book you reach for a word.
Given a word you give it to a friend
at least you think you’re giving
but who are you
and who is he, or she, to bear
what you have found?
We silence children
to keep them from telling the truth.

3.
Only late in the morning of life
have I come to understand
the peopleness of trees,
the talkative, the tender,
the fragile, sturdy, enduring.
Qualities we emulate without awareness,
we lean on them, we build
our houses from them,
we burn them to keep warm.
But maybe all this is
part of their plan too.

4.
Identity means plan.
Blueprint. Architect’s
rendering with no
architect in sight.
On site. Picture a tree
before a long flat house
lots of windows in a metal wall.
The tree is a blue spruce,
conical and tall. Now tell
from this information alone
who lives in the house, and who
their true love will be, and how
many children will they have.
Will it be real. Will the crow
deign to perch on so flat a roof.
If I were an artist I would
draw cookies on the lawn to tempt the birds.

5.
I look at all
that I have said
and wonder
where I got it.

For the moment
I don’t wonder
if I have a right
to speak—I’ll

go on till they
stop me, or they,
the others,
stop coming

close enough
to be said.
When I say Listen
to me I mean

Forgive me
for speaking
words from
elsewhere

hungering for you,
you right now,
to listen is the road,
to hear is to be free.

6.
OK, I can’t dance,
not worth a pebble
in your shoe to show me
how to do, no,
I am of the slipper folk,
the shufflers downtown,
the stand here until
that gorgeous Sun comes up.
I tell my beads a thing or two
and wait for that Lady—
does dance always have to be moving?
I remember Yvonne Rainer
leaning standing by a quiet wall
motionless except for all
the little ways a body moves
when it’s at rest. This
was the most dance I ever saw.

7.
So we should really need
a passport to be silent,
enter unspeaking into the
quivering dark from which
all language comes. Passport
to the other side. Signed
by your mother tongue
and witnessed by your true love.
Who knows what you’ll learn
in that country, and when
if ever you come back
what language you’ll be speaking.
You’ll stand in the market
and speak clearly
until someone comes along
who understands what you say,
just like any poet since the start of time.

17 October 2020