ROBERT
KELLY

= = = = =

All I am is anywhere else.
Mountain crag, no blade
of grass, what do they eat
and the rocks tumble down.
Naked nursemaid flogs a child—
wait, is this religion?

2.
Mars is near the moon tonight,
something red, woke coughing
from an old disease, la vie
humaine. Caterwauling,
is that what I? Images
come to us from asteroids,
they pass and leave us
stuck with what they showed.

3.
Golden pinecone on the Pantheon,
so who is God when you say the word?
Alphabets all over us, yet hard
to pronounce the stone,
the creep of glaciers
past the sleeping bears.
The child starts crying
and the nursemaid stops.

4.
You see, old friend, hold
firmly to what you don’t quite know,
leap towards the unknown
but do it quietly, at home,
in the dark. You can get
anywhere from here.
Sometimes music helps,
the news from Mozart,
listen. Tender moss
you think his name must mean
when you first hear it
but then comes the slow
movement of the ninth concerto
and a whole new century
falls into your hands.
There is no one in the music
ever, only you.

5.
Pay for the privilege
we say, barbers and harlots,
cowboys and clerks.
Everybody is part of the act.
My friends are in Philadelphia now,
for instance, they have their reasons,
rivers, children, universities,
maybe even owls in the park.
A city is naught without owls.

6.
Not trying to be clever,
just trying to walk the boulevard
from the museum to the cathedral
and study the nature of God again,
between what God has made
and what we have made of Him.
If him is the right word
but let it pass for now,
I have so many mistakes to correct
and the trees along the way
are already losing their leaves.

7.
Why are they allowed
to show such things,
crumbling mountain,
starving bear? Don’t we know
that images last forever
and what we see becomes us,
terror tattoo of things seen?
I wake between nowhen
and nowhen else
to write down what they told
my eyes, and sleep showed more,
now I have to wash the images
with words so that you know
but are not hurt by what you know.

8.
I said the nurse had stopped,
I mean the child whimpered
his way back to sleep
through the broken alphabet
which is all we have left
of how the world was made.

4 October 2020

1.
Pillow filled with
empty blue bottles
clank as you tread
the walkways of sleep.
Who is your farmer,
who harries your corn?

2.
The colors do it
by themselves,
the autumning. Can
the word come from avis,
when the leaves
fly away like birds.

3.
Easy cry New!
when the oldest
thing in the world
is new every day–
Pound told us that,
he heard it in China
where he never was—
is that new enough?

4.
New enough to be green still?
Early October
the dreams come thick
and waking is a compromise.

5.
Follow the dream
dreams don’t
know how to lie
or tell the truth.
They tell and tell
till you are told.
Cling to the banisters
of sleep until, until, until…

6.
Windows shut,
heat turned on,
slept ill.
The softest
things we know
are full of bones.
I repeat, nothing is easy.
Dawn is a priest
looks at me severely—
every window is a church.

7.
Catenary—the way
a cable swoops,
how a straight line
behaves in the real world,
o pallid geometers.
The shortest distance
is always around some corner.
Lie on your side,
listen to your blood
talk into the pillow.
The pillow will remember, be careful who you sleep beside,
morning always asks hard questions.

8.
I mean we eat the kale
but do not know the farmer.
We see the lake but I don’t swim.
See the difference? What if
the air was pure oxygen,
what would we see growing then?
We need the dark, the quiet one
with tender eyes who tells us No.

3 October 2020

It’s not about me
not about me—
that’s what the crow
is always calling,
warning, guiding, look
all around you,
choose another path
through the woods,
hurry home now,
think a different thought,
clean your mind
with pure listening,
come, go, it’s not
about me, not about me.

29 September 2020

Yes, I was born along
the edge of things,
the marsh that holds the city,
migrant birds singing foreign
in the cattail grass, the whole
horizon a closed eye. Edgy,
they say, always on edge, yes,
how could it be otherwise.

2.
The letters I wait for
I have to mail myself,
stay up late to write them,
wait for the mailman
to bring them back
romanced by otherness and far.
Or, to be true to my seaside start,
I have a long, long conversation
with an oyster, the rugged kind,
from the south, makes me do
all the talking, I am both sides
at once and no shell to keep me safe.

3.
What a way to talk about a friend.
As if the whole world
were a waitress
you’re flirting with
in some midnight dive.
What a way to think
about philosophy, theology,
Gothic spires, sleek
hips of Aphrodite by Phidias.
You get me all confused—
one night Olson and I
walked all the way
along the Santander corridor
to the Bay of Biscay to see
Britain far away, walked back
to his place in the Fort.
Weird how distances disperse
while humans talk,
cup of black coffee, hidden Grail.

4.
I hope I’m happening you.
You’re there,
between the closet and the sink,
cigarette smoke dangling above
but who’s smoking?
We don’t do that anymore,
it’s like the Roller Derby
or Robin Hood, lost in time.
But there you are, intimate
authority, leaning on the sink.
If it were up to me, every
kitchen would be full of chairs
so we could sit and think
about the food, and what we mean
by feeding it to one another,
the whole epistemology of choosing
what to eat. Dark matters.
It’s your fault. You make me think.

29 September 2020

Walked in and the wind
was calm. The names of things
though clattered round the head,
occipital fairytales trying
for frontal rationality.
Fat chance. It’s mostly dream
anyway, the thick dream
called the dictionary. As if.
As if words were things
and were there, here,
to be with us and comfort us
as we limp down the mountainside,
who am I fooling, the meek
hillock of the day to day.

2.
The shadows under big trees
are richer and deeper than wine
must be for those who drink
but do not chalice it. The dark
is sumptuous, full of subtle,
touches and departures,
bright eyes suddenly seen
seeing me I thought I saw.

3.
Wouldn’t it be useful if
you could look back suddenly
over your shoulder and see
what you’d been thinking just
a few moments back? As if
the thinking left a trace out
there in matter world, sidewalks
and shadows, crowds of people
you thought you had forgotten?

4.
Let us suppose, the pompous magus
declared, that the world right now,
this very instant is the sum
total of what every human in it
thought ten seconds back.
And not just humans. I declined
his supposition, slept on,
a causeless victim of someone else’s dream.

5.
That’s a gloomy way of putting it,
sun in Libra and cold nights.
In my dream an inch of snow
lay on the porch, wake up!
is the solution. But there is
no problem. Or none out there,
but much further away. Why
does power make those who wield it
hate and hurt the ones they rule?
Send me your answer by Capricorn
when the fang of weather really bites.

6.
Remember the rosary
a prayer on each bead
and no reason to stop,
round and around.
A year is like that, any
day can be a pause for breath
or take a rest. Or say
a different prayer.

22 September 2020

Milarepa
under a leaf
sheltered—

himself and a friend
from the rain,
the leaf no bigger
and they no smaller
still they sheltered
beneath one leaf

2.
the leaf
a word
sheltered
them from the rain,
from the seeming

3.
to dwell in
o twist
the story:
in the seeming
they sheltered
from the seeming—

miracle of Milarepa,
the mind large
enough to shelter under,

the radiant seemingless
safe beneath all seeming.

21 September 2020