HEART THREAD Parts Twenty-One and Twenty-Two

21.

Don’t live forever they don’t count
the stars

it’s a kind of broken pavement

music gushes out of crevices each gap
a sore

earth is the ventriloquist who tunes
our lips

the cries of children turn out to be

grownups turn into conversation

Whitman wrote nothing but the cries
of children

our only real poet avoided writing
poems

I call it semaphore because he bears a sign

I can’t read it can you? A sign of
itself

a revelation of revelation a storm in
the mirror

no air left to write the answer
down.

22.

A raft is remembrance

should you wake beside direction

and where we went an apple gate

dark with understanding and a touch

so later off the esplanade one Danish ship

seen in a sluice of fog a word
misused

loved for the juice of it the slip of
mouth

the president waved from his open car

I stood on the corner with John
Kennedy

one rainy afternoon when Carthage
fell

forgive the immigrants the land cried
out for

the white man failed the lesson of
the earth.

ROBERT
KELLY