Kelly, Robert

English

Bard College

Bard CollegeBard Digital CommonsRobert Kelly Manuscripts Robert Kelly Archive6-1995junB1995Robert KellyBard CollegeFollow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.bard.edu/rk_manuscriptsThis Manuscript is brought to you for free and open access by the RobertKelly Archive at Bard Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusionin Robert Kelly Manuscripts by an authorized administrator of Bard DigitalCommons. For more information, please contactdigitalcommons@bard.edu.Recommended CitationKelly, Robert, "junB1995" (1995). Robert Kelly Manuscripts. Paper 1175.http://digitalcommons.bard.edu/rk_manuscripts/1175F A C I N G    There are two kinds of shaving: looking at oneself, the shaver, in a silvered mirror or looking at the other, outside, usually electric.  Both of these courses have merit but I usually prefer the latter, for the view, my friend the Road seen from my window, and whoever comes along it, a man after my own heart ambling along keeping his distance  and a truck or two goes by and the little black Norelco buzzes in my hand, right up under my ear now, loud, not so different from the lazy assassins on their riding mowers,  buzz, maybe I’ll look up and see the grass has been mowed, dead branches buzzsawed, trenches dug, the Curile Ædile with his saffron band inspecting boundaries, they’re all stretching purple tapes along the ground,  from stick to stick a measure’s taken!  And the priests come hopping on one foot, their shawms snarling and their tambourines, their tambourines, and they call my bushes names in Latin,                  things in Latin.  They form cotillions on the village green and wave their plumed standards: eagles, lions, bears, bees, their golden bees buzz around my garden and I am staring in my eyes again, there is no difference,  my face is everywhere and now they’re chanting Greek.          7 June 1995    for Charlotte, as of 3 June 1995   How could it ever have been different? That question is a feeling, the feeling is the answer, there is a world of empty answers.  We were born inside that quietness which is the heart of language— the words come later, hands and tongues, almost as the line of least resistance speak.  But first the quiet.  You watched the sea from your own house, I watched the sea from a sea marsh. I had to walk a mile to get there— so have to talk more, scribble more, faster,  to get to that quiet shore.  And there you always are.  Quiet beautiful body, quiet beautiful mind, understanding everything you saw with the analytic of alertness,  the shore you are.   I came to you to learn perfection. Which comes exactly by observation, the prayer  of being intimate, unfrightened eyes the color of what they see, ocean that is always moving.  But they don’t move.  The sea also is serenity, or the shore (the shore you are) is that part of the sea which is its quietness.  Where you let me come to you.   for  my Charlotte, my perfect Wife, in celebration of our second wedding anniversary, a seamark in the miracle of our marriage B E T W E E N  O N E  W O R D  A N D  T H E  N E X T    We meet the absurdity of time with a sentimental face — green like the little words we ventured first, the dark green woods of talking with other people,    where we learned in that umbrageous with that our desires, terrors, have colors of their own.  And when we come back we find nothing but the color.     So many years just to know green!      One speaks and angels listening decipher in what you said a shorter and more valiant text that tells the truth.       The analysis includes us.  It appears  simple as daytime.  Just there among the newspapers, the broken eggs, the news of interest rates climbing and falling as pleaseth Another.     The hen is far, what have we done. What have we done?     To speak, listen. To listen, open your eyes.  To see, place two fingertips together in the dark. Thorns without roses, a pressure reaching shorewards from that great tree whose rustling leaves we call The Sea.         8 June 1995 P E R E M P T O R Y  D I S C L O S U R E    A coracle bobbing in the estuary bears shepherd and shepherdesses to my sheepless island.  Rose without fragrance, forgive me.  Coral darkened with so many sunsets, forgive me.  Green hill with me standing on it alone, forgive me.  The life you give me  is a sky with a tree in it whose roots are everywhere, maybe even are normal, maybe even down in there.  Ashore they come and call me but I hide.         8 June 1995 _____________________________    What an angry face would remember  if it could fall into piece.  The water is disordered.  I touch the crinoline grocers wrap their fancy pears in, the touch’s as good as the taste,  now why do I say that, not cloth at all, just crinkly paper, this vegetable my aunt. Sweet miracle, to come back home.  Artifice, all this artifice, plebiscite of pigeons, they all walk away, that’s what they like to do, big-breasted strutting under benches, a pigeon is nothing if not tangential. And evidential.  He remembers that home is not enough to come to.          8 June 1995, New York  L A N D S C A P E :  G R A M E R C Y  P A R K    Antiquity is sunlight.  Stripes of it that feel like wind when I touch the unfamiliar  open window.  Screenless. Late rising city, light that fell.  Time is travel  and there’s an end to it. It is too early to brook contradiction outside and below  the hidden waters of Manhattan move. My city, I keep saying, my city, like a drunk over the snapshot of his dead wife.  But I have never explained the Fifth Secret, the one only I know rarer than the Eagle in Heaven  or Ship skipping on the Sea.  The mystery of a city and its man and how it means me.  Maybe she would not have left me if I said.  =  When a city has as many as New York did, does, each of those it has participates a city of his or her own.  There are, in great cities, as many cities as citizens, each of them duly  inscribing its own way in the other.  A city is a garden of reciprocals.  It writes its streets into me, and by them I know myself, the passions or despondencies roused or soothed in each thoroughfare of what I suppose my own history.  And I write my movements into it, wearing its literal pavements, blocking or easing its actual traffic.  The thousands of New York streets I walked merge tunelessly with thousands I never stepped on or even saw, so that comfortable busy avenues in Corona or Hunt’s Point were as blank and remote to me as Moscow or Wadi Musa.  Men are bees, and ride lines of light invisible, necessitous, inescapable.  The bee paths through the meadows of becoming, spoor of the hunt a city child is always on. Then the sudden space-smitten, vista-dazzled standstills of a child in the city!  Immensity of avenues, Grand Concourse receding forever north, away.  Great peopled away, away, from which one never can come home!    A child gapes at such vastnesses, of buildings or empty spaces, he lives in such a tiny room, how can there be such vast spaces, how can there be a sky?  And how can the sky fit so well into the hugeness of the city, the whole sky nestled, bobbing on the bottle green of the East River.  And all those distances and endless ascensions have their match in inner distances, miles and miles of continuous erection.  We walk the city into place, the city shapes us as we move.  Walking holes in the darkness.  Then light snaps through and is shaped incredibly just like one of us, the stars in heaven are ourselves we reach to touch.  Dare to speak to.  Can one speak to a stranger on the street?  Pressing against the hot soft humid but unrelenting air of August nights in Brownsville, the crowds in light on Pitkin Avenue jostling in front of the basketballs in the windows of Davega’s or smelling the garlicky meat at Kishke King, the nervous crowds of gamblers and baseball fans and intellectuals —each in a world of his own, dreaming his own futures, anxious for headlines that may never come — waiting for the tomorrow’s papers at the newstand on Utica Avenue next to Dubrow’s cafeteria, the papers come out and tell us what we think, we are nervous standing so many of us alone, and then the dark murmurous companies of old people summing up the day and the world on Eastern Parkway under the leafy shabby plane trees in bat-flittering shadows they sit on slatted benches and talk the way we talk when all else is over and all else has failed, and this talk of ours will fail too, and we will pass into the streetless dark the bats fly so securely but till that moment we are humans, we have streets and language, and the place where streets and language live together is the city.  The old ones hold sticks of burning punk in their puffy fingers, wave them listlessly, in hopes the listless smoke will dismay mosquitoes. But no one is ever turned back from his work or from his appetite, no one at all.  We go on walking, always guessing, no doubt wrongly, that our real name is spelled with other roads.         9 June 1995, New York_____________________________    Flutterlife hemquick the wind’s character to tease.  Approachable reticences, apprentices  reach out for more.  Any image is demi-monde,  there is a real Society that does not look.          10 June 1995, New York T H E  H Y D R A N T S    Run from the pump-house  to bring more fire, a sort of liquid that smarts the eye.  Who polishes the doorknob when the wind comes to call? Who rolls ripe pears on the kitchen floor  so that they wobble on linoleum soft as an old man speaking Gaelic? Who staked a flagpole in my lawn and what flag flies from it?  Can one mirror be eternity?         10 June 1995, New York   P E A R S   Everywhere I look there are drawings of pears. We are in love with fruits, evidently, just as much as with lines and nubby textures— most of these pears are as fuzzy as peaches.  What do we want when we look at a picture? They are round and tapered, breastlike, testicular too, sexy and tasty and all too often hard as rocks when you take them out of the bag.  The Assistant Managers (Produce Section) must bring  the ripe ones home to their mothers or worse.  Leaving us with the picture, in grisaille, next to the espresso machine, kind of dirty,  fly specks on it.  What are fly specks, anyhow? They seem to occur in novels a lot, as badges of inferior cafes,  the way pictures of pears proliferate all over Manhattan these days.  Every bistrot has some ripe impersonal inedible image on the wall,  but if I can’t eat it I’d rather look at structures:  the Pont-Neuf, say, or a bird’s eye view of the Polo Grounds.  Of course it’s the shape.  Feminine, or in a pinch male muscular, curvy, just unsymmetrical enough to keep us interested, like Cleopatra’s nose. Isn’t it strange they all think we all want to look  at the same things everywhere.  I could sit here and stare at my own wrist or as much of my forearm as I let peek out of my cuff.  These pears are grey, a dismal prospect, graceful, promising not much.      10 June 1995, New York [done 14 June 95]  P O S T C A R D     Here at the Gramercy a cool weekend in June the Pocahontas thing in the park but not so bad we walked right by and had the pleasure of a Blimp above and Jews for Jesus handing our cute yellow leaflets and not too far away — and not too loud — some Family Rock emitted evidently by the trees themselves. Where all the police bay geldings sheltered from the drizzle. After all, a city is mostly grammar.  Outlives the semantic inclinations of its citizens, does not succumb to their momentary minds (“words”) or whims, keeps pure structure, or structure pure.  Outcropping of bedrock near the museum, our native metamorphic fact.  I mean the way streets fit together, the way you can or can’t get into houses — buzzers that never work, the key inside a rolled up sock tossed from the fire escape, catch it before it hits the gutter, the lurkers at the threshold, call from the corner phone and I’ll come down, it’s not such an easy thing to get inside as any schoolboy knows.  Even the churches are locked. And even on the hottest days the wind swoops in from the river.         11 June 1995, New York  SUPPOSE THE MONTH IS WRONG, THE CLOCK, THE CALENDAR   Yesterday the joyous shouts, the whistles, no one can whistle like Latinos, of the thousands, tens of thousands, Puerto Rican Day, thousand in white summer muscleshirts, their flags with just one star, big star, flag capes, headband flags, flag shirts, flags held modestly furled on litte sticks, the old women held them so, or flapped from jackstaffs, waved like Iwo Jima over everything, their flags and whistles, their shouts in unisons, word lost in the speaking, lost in the shouting, found in the air, thousands in the avenues, in the terminal, every train, joyous, offending nothing but the ears, the ears are meant to suffer, they are the organs of politics and complaint, the sluice of revolution, the dead sea of despair, the ears witness the vast throng, thiasos, throng of the apart, bewildering the world with whistles, troupes of bare bellied high laughers, everybody 23 years old, by the thousands, with whistles.  And we knew what it must feel like to march into a fallen city, wild with the noises of our coming, the whistles, the rhythmic great shouts of our coming.  And we knew what it must feel like to live in an occupied city when the troops of the new gods roll into town,  whistling and shouting and waving weird flags and so happy with being themselves  they don’t have a moment yet to bother their smiling heads about us.          12 June 1995    Back from the Mythropolis _____________________________    One summer day the man woke up and thought December, the ink runs uphill in my veins, the trees are sluggish. He didn’t believe a word the sun said, or the rain thereafter, gentle, even when it was full of yellow pollen that left a map like China on his window sill.  Belief is difficult.  His dreams were nothing special, no snow, no arctic terns, no bitter winds tattooing naked skin with symmetries of shiver.  He just knew it was winter, the sun an accident, not an essence, of Time.  He woke and maybe deep inside his wrongness was a yearning to be wrong.  Maybe that is our love too, to go astray, make the wrong move, be late, get lost, stay on the train when the doors close and your neighborhood slides behind, the only thing you ever knew.  Only the wrong turn can help me now, at the end of every street somebody’s death is waiting.                  12 June 1995          A U  P A I R  D E  L U N E   she comes in with viaducts for hands a vital sign runs down the fresh skin of her young throat she swallows her lunch in Swedish she forgives me for needing so much car  for I was born at night time and when dark comes back again I come to life and scream or listen to old opera records on the phonograph she touches me to soothe or startle  and here I thought I was all alone in the music but she is suddenly there with her pale skin the 78 rpm turntable slings round so much noise is it Salome content to die for love and die she does  or is it Dalila inveigling her husband?  Really we have to trick ourselves before we can trick others. I have to imagine the taste of her arm since all I taste is my own spit left from the last nibble.  I love her white clothes.  I love it when she turns from me and steps out of them into the bathtub, forgetting  that I’m there or remembering it and wanting to teach me what it means to have the Moon for my maid  and I watch the water gushing over her shoulders and flanks she is pink behind the vinyl shower curtain printed with a map of this Republic, her elbow is in Maryland, her left knee in Colorado, I will never have landscape  that does not look and feel and taste and move like her. So in my whole life she is the only place I’ve ever been.           12 June 1995 C O S M O L O G Y   Compose the night.  The excitement you want to understand is pain.  The sadist teaches that all pleasures finally hurt.  Attachment burns the skin.  And then goes in deeper, to meet the emerging greed.  At the level of my sense   of being me     they meet. This self is that pain, the night full of joyous rowdy futile shout. Inside the quaking bed we lie in fear.    I thought this watching the poor girl with a tattooed breast bared to the travellers, smiling, brushing make-up on.  The pain we give back to the world trying to make it smile. Cosmos is remorse.  Cosmology is confession.          13 June 1995  _____________________________    One is happy in one’s fashion. Self-destruction is hard work and keeps one busy.  Sister, I wanted to cry, it’s the wrong  self you’re destroying! But what do I know, I who am and am so busy destroying the self I see, that never did anything to me,  and leaving undisturbed the secret enemy.          13 June 1995 The measure once determin’d   The patrol of frogs incantation —dawn— ururura dixunt babuinae cantilena melismatica mode of Turquoise big as a ripe grape held in the bronze lips of  a statue of the Other God —in this little pyxis my image waits.   For we magians carry our souls in little boxes, red leather stencilled in silver, here and there a turquoise or some amber, ladies, to soothe eye-ache or the pain of truth, or crystal, or coral prong to pierce the prairie nights, the steppes of Central Labor.   We carry and we peek inside to see if Who We Are is resting or awake scheming or dreaming this plot you take for the real— hardly awake yet, barely morning and the wave falls.         14 June 1995  _____________________________    Beyond this hate the hope not to abolish but see through it so ardently and well  reveals the opening. Door in the sky.   Cloud. Window.  Wait. Wait but wait alive,  seeing without the least look.          15 June 1995  T R A W L I N G    Trawling, is that what fishermen do? Slow movements of the line, alertness softly waves, allowing  and allowing, and listening until it comes, the word, is it a word, means you (needs you) to say.  For this  you need a lot of morning.            15 June 1995  _____________________________    So much theory and whining and graduate school chalk dust. For Christ’s sake, try to write something that would make  your mother happy if you laid it on the table in front of her. Writing is pleasure, and to give pleasure, and give more. Can you give pleasure?  Take back the Net!           15  May 1995  

junB1995

Bard CollegeBard Digital CommonsRobert Kelly Manuscripts Robert Kelly Archive6-1994junB1994Robert KellyBard CollegeFollow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.bard.edu/rk_manuscriptsThis Manuscript is brought to you for free and open access by the RobertKelly Archive at Bard Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusionin Robert Kelly Manuscripts by an authorized administrator of Bard DigitalCommons. For more information, please contactdigitalcommons@bard.edu.Recommended CitationKelly, Robert, "junB1994" (1994). Robert Kelly Manuscripts. Paper 1224.http://digitalcommons.bard.edu/rk_manuscripts/1224T H E  N A T U R A L    Wood march closing in  the green battalion that takes our lives  breathless with character a destiny arrives  oxygen destroying like flowers the trees come down the hill  white sailed, wearing a dark red poppy in the buttonhole  like a wound I promise to give you and you put on  trembling with equivoque not sure even yet I have it right  what I’m  trying to say is that my urgency to you is not just like but is alas an actual part of  the boundless push of ‘nature’ (all we know)  towards fulfilments and extinctions in its huge beautiful idiot dualities  I mean like this field of tall dapper weeds hurrying inward and downward towards our house  like a relentless(because mindless) mist.        5 June 1994 DUHKHA    Chatter for a pilgrim from these pilgrim arts      nothing not the same be bodiless  courage of blue things or be bare in splendor circumstance is motherhood enough  a trowel needs one day alone to marry other the grit holds hair together our immigrant buildings sand and long black hair       stress is universal suffering to say it straight a party of noisy children each sacramenting solo inner own separate feeling  the Existenz inside blue path and Africa our pointless revels come to hand.          6 June 1994   T H E  P U R I S T    The spiritual range or the day come back   humidity you old seducer Juneable in sunhaze how it brings a city to her knees with amorous complaining µε µουσικες, like a cat and a cat and a newborn babe  the sky is sick inside her clothes  language is on loan, the breath alone may be our own  (and Flaubert tried to own it, Dictionnaire of his spleen about clichés, about received expressions, the words  all too common, too mean to mean,  and wanted to purge it, make it pure and just again  but all you can purge from language is other people         7 June 1994 T H E  P R O P R I A T E    what is our own maple is our own a tree or Berkeley People’s Park strolling through the stoned zones unscanted leaf-battered as may be in strong sun  happy as Egypt as a termite keep the Hittite  sun north and the shadow of a woman be my side no a gate a doorway into the inmost holymost that moving altar with me all my days in the Name of the Name and of his Mother ve le-olam hasdo her mercy also that would be our speech.         7 June 1994   _____________________________    When you know what the god looks like you are ready to impersonate him you think with your eyebrows your shoulderblades everything you learns in Descartes is no benefit now  you have to think with your hipbone like a common dancer with your ankle like a common million-dollar athlete. Who are you now with all the bones thinking?  You are the god your eyes are rolled up inside they turn into one eye in the flank of a pyramid you’ve seen it all your life and now you become it  you are it and you rattle around you are a car a door banging open and shut in wind on the endless prairie.          8 June 1994 A  B O O K  O F  M A P S     Who knows where weather went one hurries to declare whatever is unnatural— the rest needs no saying, hence valentines to speak to a spirit roused by joining that is not just for joining.  All through the light crows busy [verb] on the lawns.  We know a word that waits— the Baltic shallows deep enough to swallow any man.  A whole army is one breath deep.  Past counting all sorts of wise remarks occur to one (I am a street.  Discover the city each one must be, hamlet or metropolis.) but does one listen? From the garish earnestness of the Cathedral you go down Vauxhall Bridge Road to the river. Too big, the place, for the religion. Impressive rather than beautiful.  Effective?  Don’t know. Had only these effects on me:  refused a beggar on the steps.  And now say this.  Remember the sheer seductions of Eric Gill line by line. Art!  What little sense you make of emptiness! With a long walk and crossing Chiswick Bridge you’d come to Mortlake.  The river there is said on certain oily mornings to reflect the flames that once burned John Dee’s library. Stare into the distressed stream and hope Since the crematorium is not far.          9 June 1994  A T  T H E  A L T A R  O F  T H E  L A R E S     Ripe to re-personate that deity or that dead occasion with brass buttons how well the years polished them against the midnight blue of his coat my grandfather my serge I carried his baton in ornamental urgencies, neat riots, crownings in Himalayan monarchies, or cats in heat. We inherit so few instruments, and these were mine: a wand of light wood turned and polished black, his.  A red blank notebook with many pages, his son’s.  A ball of yarn, rough tingly blue, hers,  with glints in it that made me think of August lightning.                      10 June 1994  When you know the mind you know what is to come   easy sayables of men drinking together in the shadow of a tree not making much sense  or no sense but contact — strongest of all chains  talk to me true and tell who the shadows are and what this mockingbird is up to talking now while the crow speaks with native fluency a field away all the sweet clichés white and red and their thorn twigs and everything quiet except for the far trafic  I say to know all this is to know nothing I tell you for no reason except that you can know me knowing.          11 June 1994  _____________________________    Rain spatter trim my tree I have an open mind I can’t get started blue prairie I have to learn these people a friend’s vague eyes and Ûlumukhâ’s owl face all worlds the interpenetrate the sudden now I lift this cup of gods my body drink me Prince Andrei is still looking at the sky.  2. Who are these people?  Words fall off informal pages.  Only the accurate held in Form’s focus speaks.  Else is fugitive and sad, come home with diseases. Sooner or later one leaves one’s house. The monk chooses the sooner of the later the rainy season catches him serene  winter lets him test the serenity of busy roads— a market is all learning.        12 June 1994  a woman named revenge is getting married   Who is the priest who’ll hold her vows to what strange husband?  I see in the papers a woman named Revenge is getting married, a sunken priest and a decorated groom lead the bride, she holds a knife or scalpel I can’t tell, the groom keeps changing faces, you see strange things in the papers, a scalpel walks, an island takes its vows and sinks them, isn’t the sea itself the first of its own victims, drowned in its heaving, water in water spent until we call it marriage since no one listens?         14 June 1994  _____________________________    There is a kind of order known as sky through which our tourist cultures move, uneasy at the silence they provoke, that all our chatter never turns to speech.  When things are dark enough you see them— there is some certainty, some home and a mango in a basket.  Philosophy, trying to account for things, should strive to take note of them instead, and be content in this vast striving to attend. Who is left to name the pieces of the world?  I say a rose on a table, cat on a windowsill, mango in a basket, a million people wake and go to work, a street sullied with sunlight. But these are general observations, consequences it is true of what is seen and what is known, but not this cat.  This cat. This house where no one wakes.  Thorns in the water glass beneath the roses.  Pain that capital city where all the information is.         14 June 1994, Boston   

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