ROBERT
KELLY

The precious routines

of solitude,

                      bird on a branch

saying nothing,

meaning everything.

The eyes are given to us

to open and to close–

madness means forgetting this.

                                            5.VIII.20

No answer yet.
Pineapple slices from the can
so neatly cored,
yellow ciphers,
the terrible sweetness
of logical things,
the song of zero.

2.
Listen, I tell myself again,
a train goes by,
every night
about this hour,
never exactly the same minute,
freedom is not far,

3.
then why is the train going
and why did it come back
to go again and again
while only the horny and the hungry
are awake to hear it,
busy themselves with its meaning,
the far cities,
the forests of why?

4.
No answer yet
but nothing bores the questioner,
on and on, all night long,
sleep is just another form of it,
sleep is asking.

5.
Of course the night
tries to answer you,
always has, since you were a kid
in a railroad flat in Cypress Hills,
windowless bedroom
cross on the wall,
the dark did all it could.
It lurked and listened—
I think that was enough,
taught me to wait in the dark.

6.
So that the joyous morning
was always a kind of disappointment,
a fruit too sweet, too bright,
too new, and me a clumsy pharisee
hugging the scraps of the law,
the dry leaves left from dream.

7.
I.e., poetry. Who’s there?
Did the chest of drawers
shift in the dark?
Why does the floor creak?
Who is your mother?
sometimes I dared to ask the dawn,
Guessing at the answers
no one would give.

8.
Yes, there were windows,
but they were far away.
Even in the kitchen the table
was as far as could be from the light,
there was a war on, I drank my milk
and ate white bread, I understood
that much at least
about time and history,
eggs are oval, fruit is round,
any minute they’ll make me
go to school.

9.
                                 The feeling
does not change. it reeks
of morning still. No answer
comes apart from what we do,
every minute of our lives
is our attempt to answer
nobody’s question.
And nobody is the most
important one there is.

                                       5 August 2020

There is no ocean here

to tell me what to do.

Time unwraps something

with its hands.  I stretch

my arm through a month

to find tomorrow.  Water

or not, that is always the way.

I am here to obey.

                               5 August 2020

On some sofa beside me
almost a song, lifted a leaf
of as if it were sheet music
we used to say, innocent score,
fumbling hands. I was alone
with a piece of paper
what could I do but read it,
and it was blank, so
what could I do but write?

2.
That’s not how it began,
it feels like that still.
The triangulation: muscles
moving in the fingers,
mechanism of the keyboard
object moving in space—
and the sound coming out.
In this triangle someone
could find a self and spend a life.

3.
But it didn’t happen that way too.
You were always with me–
you being the shape of the other,
the answering voice I needed to answer,
the mountain across the river,
you absolute horizon.

4.
That’s closer to how it began.
How I began. Before that
the crowded waiting room
called childhood, where the one
lesson is to learn to be alone.
At least until the mountain comes along.

5.
Now we’re all here together,
naked in history,
learning to read
by finding the secret lover
in every book,
childhood is a state that never ends.

6.
Time to join
the whirlpool and the wolf,
the hunger and the hurry.
Take in as you are taken in
until you reach the quick
(means living) center of time
(means now) (and you means me).

7.
So on this altarpiece is shown
the transubstantiation
of time to space, space
is what we always have,
space loves us, time
is just an accident of travel,
space loves us, sits always
beside us on the sofa,
stretches out with us in bed,
walks to the corner store with us,
helps us find the mountain,
lets us lean against the tree
and fish in our pocket,
that special space, to find
whatever strange thing it is
we think we need. It’s there
all round me. It holds my hand.

                                                       4 August 2020

Haydn wrote a symphony a day
for a hundred days
but the days weren’t all together,
depending on the weather,

sometimes it takes a year
to reach tomorrow.
The last ones are the days
I like best, say 98 to 104,

but who am I? And who was
Haydn anyhow, father of many?

                                                      3 August 2020

Did Audubon do animals?
I want to see his wombat,
echidna, hippopotamus.

Mozart wrote secret
music for the birds—we all
know that, and Beethoven
gave intelligence to thunder.

So who will sanctify by art
the woodchuck at our fence,
the streak of sunlight
running down our door?

Everything is trying to get in!
O a girl is a gospel of oyster shells,
a boy is a minor felony, grow up,

grow up and be God at least
the way everything else is,
permanent, mysterious and true.
                                                         3.VIII.20