CONJUNCTIONS: A Web Exclusive

Three Poems Robert Kelly

Fall Day They are blowing the leaves away and then together. They are doing things with leaves to the leaves. And taking the leaves away. This happens. Philosophers have no convincing explanation. Biologists keep canny silence. Tell me how many leaves they say what kind of leaves they say and how many of each kind they say. These questions are the same as silence. When it is cold the mind walks a long way to school because at a certain point in childhood you stop having a body. It happens at a particular street the street has a name the bus passes. The clothes are still there still real they move by themselves. This is the meaning of childhood: you do not exist. The Count of Monte Cristo is waiting to become you he has a sword he has a girl at either elbow offering him green wine and hashish paste. You have read about the world now here it is. Cars and trucks hurry past terrified of your emptiness. Even the leaves are frightened of you or would be if there were still leaves. Bruckner at Saint Florian                     Something in the back of the mind, the old shed, shack, corner burlap sack of potatoes we poor men ate this. Not now. Something else. Now is paper. Scissors.                     A whole orchestra trying to remember. Who were we when we were? Sometimes sun stuns. He falls off his horse all the way into the sky down—           when you think, everything becomes a matter of distance and no unit                     of measurement           measures us all. No measure.                     Immoderate music           a cloakroom full of violins but I wanted amber, the umber of shadow on suntanned women also trying to remember everybody was who everybody was. Now if you get lost in this music, this knot-browed deep-breathing kneeling music, you’ll be in a place where everything is found, why should I bother you with imagining to make you remember the everlasting Christmas of the heart music is always people on the move but where are they going? where the star fell off its sky and came to us and we listen, can I wear you on my hands can I touch the world by you can I pick it up and bring it home? Home is the hard word here, to live at last in the word or even the sound of a word is the realest estate to live in your word, your magdalen mouth. Ritual Dances 1. Turn it so ON is on top before you plug it in then the message will come out right— your character, accurate as ever and neat as a muscle, will be like a tight ship in one of those eighteenth-century metaphors about states and statesmen and (this is what’s important) you will sleep now. Sleep Arizona sunset, wake up Vermont, everybody is a mountain walking past your bed: show me. Show me with your body how it’s done. 2. The place where men plant peas. What exactly is sorghum anyway and could I tell you if I knew? I am generous with my information— it’s the mud I swine around in, here’s some for you: the privilege of the hypotenuse is equal to some of the fugues on the other nine themes but which?                     Lead me to your thalamus at last where all the silly conjugations lead and leave a lady                                asleep in her suppose. I always leave the answer so plainly writ you think it was the question. 3. o you and me, you and me what a sexy game of raid the larder— a Sufi person on the top shelf lodges, I hear the click of amber beads the hum of zikr sometimes in the wallboard from the other side where what I thought was me was sleeping. But my sleep was only a dream. No, you say, it is a ship yourself under full sail, on a wild sea beating through the straits of semaphore— o there’s no such place, no sea, go back to sleep, knowing there is no such sign. 4. Work your way into the sweater put it on how many yards of yarn to knit one degree of early winter morn away so you can know the day?                                          Lover, she tells me, it is Sunday—numbers are much too holy to use for counting things or reckoning— numbers are for worship—kneel before the sanctity of sevenness and I will be your deaconess and you be glad. 5. Then the church was empty. The hanged man had been dragged (or dragged himself) over the hill and left in the deep leaves for vultures and foxes as he instructed. His books were carried off and catalogued by nearby scholarship, the spilled wine and lamb fat wiped up, his thin rope unwrapped from the transom. And all of a sudden it was just as if he had been dead all the time, or else a tall mirror in a furrier’s salon waiting for the skin to speak again. 6. It’s all right things keep starting— can you feel the politics on its way, the smell of it on my hands? The brave policeman walks the lonely moon, governments are bliss-inhibitors, that’s all, yet those who trim our pleasures get no pleasure from their cut. There is a caste of men who think they’re born to tell other people what to do and there’s another caste to make them do it. Without them the rest of us could stroll around finding things and giving things to each other all the livelong day and sleep deep without the prattle of dismal instructors and when we woke we’d have new dreams to share. 7. All music is about Russia Every river is the space between your own legs— You think I don’t understand the dance Just because I stand Motionless against the wall Counting the bricks with my shoulder blades My poor lost wings I fly back through the wall I fly backwards through every solid thing, All music is trying to describe Russia The trees and factories of it, the bleak of season, Torrid wheat fields and the shadows Of hawks swoop down on alders by the stream And every river flows inside your skin And finds a way and finds a way The dance leaps up into the air sometimes the dancer follows. 8. What it would have been to be a dancer or to have danced what it could have been and not alone but not either together because a dance is one whoever does it and one dancer is all by the self who or who thinks to dance = an idea the body has of itself                                    to move regardless of anything but here the dancer leaps from an idea of the ground to an idea of the rock—feet remember earth and collarbone remembers sky how is there any room for an idea of you let alone actual you 9. but the dance is not something to see it is illicit and imperial, it hides in daylight it dares anyone to watch, the best dancer hates to be seen dances alone a dark closet 10. all the room the dancer needs is in the dancer’s body its moves are what space is made of space comes after space happens to the dance place is what is left when the dance is done. □