ROBERT
KELLY

1.
The fever plants
of the Tampa coast
help the music
to decide.
Whistle or wander,
warble or wait.

Wade
with me
in the shadows.

Shallows.
We belong
to what we hear.

2.
The notation is usually
accurate, the performers
sober and alert, the cellist
hides behind her instrument,
the blatant trumpeter
of course has to blare on
even though a modest type
himself. (But why choose brass?)

Outside, the low wind
stimulates the chemical habits
of those mystery plants
said to cure faints and fevers–
brassica family, like leafy kale
but pale. The sea celebrates
just beyond the quiet leaves.

3.
We need these things.
It can’t all be Chopin, Debussy,
another kind of rigor is required,
growl of granite, lust of limb,
someday they’ll let us out of school.

4.
Music for midnight—what kind
if you had to choose?
Wind or water? Name that tree?
Which king of France
built the coast of Normandy?

To be simple about it,
the Hungarian prairie
is very far away. And yet.

5.
Is it cold enough to be tomorrow?
What did they mean
when they asked that?
Fine tune your sweaters before breakfast,
buy roses from the south?
Radiator’s warm, fridge gurgling.

6.
We’re still here for a little while,
as I heard a wise man say
as we stood together on the plain
counting hilltops on horizon,
here a while and then an answer,
condescends. Descends I think
was meant but there goes
that music again, this or kiss,
albatross or arabesques, help
or harry, or marry, or just
this sun in calm trees now,
blue ointment of sky
a function of our longitude.
Far away as it is, I pray
I mean I think I hear the sea.

20 September 2020

1.
Book of the woman
lost into color,
all the revisions
of the light
shifted the shape of her
towards us and past me,
and the light knew her
like glass
so that my words
reached out and reached
out and touched
only the cold smooth of
all that she was.
And down the streets
of the dream white
mail trucks hurtled
in trafficless silence.

2.
There were three texts
that had somehow
to be compressed together–
not by picking and choosing
but through a massive silent
twist or pressure process
of its own, so that the three
would become
choicelessly one.

The texts were different colors:
one pale, two dark
and they were like shallow bowls,
pie crusts, the words clear.
I watched her hands arrange them
fitting one on top of the other,

the text was pale,
her hands paler.
Then something started
and darkness shrouded
whatever was going on.
And what came out is this.

3.
So now it’s up to me
to make something more,
not just dream smatterings.

I have to reclaim
the noble spacious distances
between all the words
of the original,
the texture of emptiness,
artifice, ligature,
the feel of forward in a classic text,
epic or animal.

I want it to be enough
to wake and see the wind in the trees,
the light forgiving me
into the timeless present,
but those images persist,

three must be one,
she must be lost
into what she has spoken
or made me speak,
lost so that the text
alone is left, and she herself
lingers in her own way
behind the glass,
smiling in her own eyes,
wind on its way.

4.
Am I done,
is the music ready?

Arsis and thesis,
where is the downbeat
that tells me to step,
to stop, the light foot
Duncan got from Bowra got from Pindar,

it’s not all dancing, is it,
my fingers clumsy at the keyboard
but the tones are true?

In holy sleep the felonies are healed,
I wake to say so, empowered
by the Lost Woman
who is everywhere, lost
from grasp into gravity itself,
I’m bantering theology,
it’s not all up to me, you know,
I’m just trying to peel apart
the baked pages and read
the book that woke me,
no cover on it but the words themselves,
I’m just trying to catch the tune,
it’s always only the tune that tells.

19 September 2020

From a six mile tunnel under the mountains
it happened to the wide open plain.
The trees skipped the way they do
to dodge the hurtling machines.
For a lovely morning moment
everything was just as it is.

2.
She remembered that
from her place on the balcony
you could see only a little of her
through the lattice under the poppies
(Eschscholzia californica), boxes
of cereals on the ledge
peace offerings to the birds.
She was busily remembering
a whole other continent
sometimes it’s amazing
to think one is actually here.
When two white-throated sparrows
(o how sad their song can be!)
flew away she went back to her book.

3.
Back in France the trees calmed down,
the road had the look of noontime,
empty, everywhere somewhere else.
How small we animals really are
compared to what is actually there—
you could feel the quiet sun
hinting gently something like that,
o so many reminders needed
and every step a road of its own.

4.
When the rain began
she shook the first drops
off the page she had forgotten
to keep reading, she hurried
inside and left the flowers to the rain,
such things need such things.
She shook her hair dry
and went to the fridge
where the past was stored
mostly in glass—nobody
trusts plastic anymore.
I really was there once,
she thinks, I really saw
the tunnel end and the world
come back the way it should always be,
just there, calm, leaving it
to me to do all the being,
moving around. Nothing
caught her fancy in the cold.
She shut the door—better
to go hungry than blunt
the keen arrow of human appetite
by eating something not desired
just because it’s there.
She wishes it would stop raining
so she could go sparrowing again.

5.
Less done less to regret
she remembered an old nun
saying that. Outside
a car went by hooting its
boy noise out its windows
never mind the rain.
Never mind, those things pass by.
She watched the wall, aware
that it was telling her
a little bit about what she
didn’t want to think about—
one more reminder!

OK, Wall, what happened in France?

You loved everything you saw
but wanted something else.
It cost so much just to get here
where you began, just to see
me again, your brand-new wall
that knows all the secrets of
every room you ever lived in,
what one wall knows, another
can repeat—that is the fact
of walls that humans build,
one wall knows all.

6.
That’s all about you
she cried almost angry
at the plaster, but
what about me?

Are you so different
from me? said the wall,
don’t you know you are
everywhere you have ever been,
that tunnel under the Vosges
debouches I think the word is
right into your living room,
right here, city, actual, holy, blessed.

O wall I’m sorry
I know you mean well,
or mean wall,
whichever is truer, better,
but what am I after,
why does the book end
and leave me here alone,
where do sparrows go
when they don’t see me?

I pray for you, said the wall,
because I only know
what you know,
I am your wall, plus all walls,
when they first built walls
ten thousand years ago in Turkey
they said their own prayers
so that all walls should be
a little bit like gods,
holding and protecting
and even remembering—
but no more. A wall
doesn’t know the future—
if it did it could not stand.
But I can pray, and do,
and keep the thieves away.

7.
But maybe she wanted the thief,
it takes a thief
to show you the worth
of what you have.
What they want to steal
is where I should begin
she thought. The rain stopped,
so did a bus at the corner,
she went onto the balcony,

there is clarity
even in not knowing,
knowing, knowing,
the sparrow said.
Maybe just trying to know
is a kind of knowing
and maybe knowing is enough.

10 September 2020

Outside the breeze
makes tree leaves
dance wild shadows
of your future wife.

You can learn almost
everything from them,
the moves, the play
of light and shade.

You have come here
for this, your rite
of passage from artifice
to actual.

She dances
for you, all of them do.

13 September 2020

The rooms
that enter us
and stay.

We know the doors of them
polished by dream,
the sunlight or the shallows
in each room, bedspread
table Monet print on the wall,
the old-fashioned telephone,
the empty vase.
Springtime
seldom comes,
no one speaks Latin,
the bathroom always far away.

Facts torture with images.
Room after room.

2.
And sure enough
when you wake up
you’re in yet another,

and this room too,
mainland or island,
Anglophone or otherwise,
will play its role
in some night opera
from which you can barely
awaken, like now,
into the freshness of the familiar.

3.
Nothing leaves us.
There is nowhere
for it to go. no border
it can cross to flee
the immensity of here.

4.
Warm sticky danish
coffee in a paper cup
and late to work.
The Apollo gallery in the Louvre.
Melville’s writing desk,
dentist’s office, closet
on Brown Street with the black
seal fur soft inside it.

There is no distance.
And difference is only
a taste on the tongue,
and that too soon fades.

13 September 2020

What does a tree
think of grammar?
Grammar is our grain
I guess, subjective,
objective, genitive,
ablative, conditional.
future perfect, past.
The tree knows all that
in one moment, one
glimpse of bare wood
tells more than books could,
And there is a winter
in language too,
when the leaves fall away
but the meaning stays.

12 September 2020