ROBERT
KELLY

This business of living in a body
or needing a body to live,
we’ve got to do better. True,
it’s given us great cathedrals
and sculpture and paintings,
nice memories to bring with us
if we could somehow travel
into the world of pure knowing.
Pure knowing, everything known
and no knower needed to know it,
so we’d live in pure awareness.

2.
We are still here
the trees whisper,
green or bare–
don’t think.
Your body
is the only one.
Who knows?
What you know
may last forever.

29 October 2022

Wait, I haven’t said
the morning psalm yet,
so here goes:

In Shetland the sheep
outnumber people
and why not?
Innocent and soft
but libidinous enough
to welcome many lambs
and they speak
an English of their own
and so do we, we do,
we stand in the morning
on our little island,
every one of us stands form
on an island of our own
and bleats a blessing
out over the sea,
a blessing of every me
on every thee and them
and it and all, we breathe
the morning in
and kiss it out, love, love,
the kind that made the world.

27 October 2022

1.
Nothing gate,
a glad apartness.
It sees me back,
am I a stone
or better brick
made by mind
of dirt and water,
will I? Open
I do dare, at times,
a gap in my anxiety
matches a doorway
and it goes me in.

2.
Uphill the water surges
I stood on the Pali heights
in that famous wind when
all the words I ever breathed
came roaring back at once.

3.
But it doesn’t have to be Hawaii.
Gentlest autumn trees abound
in subtle variations, color, shade,
yet tumultuous are all the leaves
and they remind, remind, remind.

4.
Spin song,
buffo romance,
never take
the lad quite
seriously,
skeptics are
good for the soul.
So I was moved to see
in that Buddhist bedroom
a crucifix on the wall
even if it was a dream.

5.
See where the gate goes?
We say gait in English too,
how one walks, as if to take
even one step is to go
and go through. All
I have to do is tell you this.

27 October 2022

How many months in a cloud?                                                Over Geneva I counted summer, in Glendale calculated
winter from the freeway.
I still don’t know.

The sky today hazy but no cloud,
at least none you can count
unless you stop at One.
Weather confuses arithmetic–
I learned that as a kid
on snowy days in school
when all the numbers fade away.
O give me algebra instead
where it’s all inside!
where nothing needs counting
and all the months are just now.

26 October 2022

I could pretend to be
someone else for a while,
a staircase in Venice
or a swingset in the park.
Still, still, beneath the going,
the flowing through the air
and come back again.
Or I could be a racing car
idling at the side of an ordinary
road, afraid to rev and run,
fear I might not get there
wherever racers go. Afraid
to say any more. Pretending
is worse than advertising,
crueler than credit cards.
I can’t even pretend anymore
though the steps of Santa Maria
are very white and very clean.

25 October 2022