The Divine Anxiety

The Divine Anxiety:

1.
The high tension of reading a poem is such that any reader is somehow, somewhere, secretly or otherwise anxious for The End, for the poem to end. That anxiety for conclusion is built into the nature of the lyric poem, the short poem, and we can't escape it. Poetry seems like a clash of Gertrude Stein's "writing wants to go on" with a kind of Aristotelian "the form wants closure" -- it may be the very tension that makes us love the delicate discomfort of the poem.

2.
The Divine Anxiety:

The high tension of reading a poem
is such that any reader is somehow,
somewhere, secretly or otherwise anxious
for The End, for the poem to end.
That anxiety for conclusion is built
into the nature of the lyric poem,
the short poem, and we can't escape it.
Poetry seems like a clash of Gertrude Stein's
"writing wants to go on"
with a kind of Aristotelian
"the form wants closure" --
it may be the very tension that makes us love
the delicate discomfort of the poem.


Robert Kelly

Posted over on Ready Steady Book

1. Kelly's prose poem.
2. Line breaks by Glenn Buttkus

Good Friday: 2006

"Dreamer" at the Palazzo San Miguel


GOOD FRIDAY 2006


And the Bishop of Manila
Saffron blind and poor
Says mass with two chisels
For women and for men.

—Lorca, “San Miguel”



It is Good Friday and why.
I am waiting for something
to tell me something
about why I am waiting

and for whom. It is not
the Bishop with the files
in his hands to saw down
the cross that has seen

so much pain in its name.
O when the cross
was just wood!
O when the bishop

was just a man and I was a man
like you and a woman
like you and the saffron
in the waterbowls

made their own daylight
in the shimmer of the butterlamps,
o when light
was only light, when the world
was enough of a mass to say.



Robert Kelly

Posted over on Ready Steady Book

On a Painting Newly Ascribed to Leonardo of Vinci

Painting by Wendy Winbeckler


on a painting newly ascribed to leonardo of vinci



This is she of whom we spoke
whose character doth alter
in proportion with our closeness to her

unlike an image: which is fixèd
certainly, and changeth not
if we come near or stand afar

This one is she who changeth
as we change, who is all hurry
towards us when we approach

yet turneth chill when from her
we strive for our souls’ sake
to move a little off. She knoweth

all things we ponder, all wishes
we endure within our hearts
she knoweth well, and from us

turneth only a little bit aside—
still close—and peereth calmly
at quiet distances she alone can see.


Robert Kelly

Posted over on Ready Steady Book

A Woman With Flaxen Hair In Norfolk Heard

A WOMAN WITH FLAXEN HAIR IN NORFOLK HEARD


Wherever you are,
in any season,
I will come to you
from the flowers

she says, and always
call me
by your native language
lest men
think I am strange

or a woman known
only in books,
I am steady as sky
and no further away,

see me in your own
color, my lips
shape the same myths
you live inside,

whenever you do this
I am with you,
to kiss you often to sleep
or wake you
sudden or gentle,
a mouth
in the middle of things.


Robert Kelly

Posted over on Nicole Peyrafitte

The Cloudherd's Song

THE CLOUDHERD'S SONG


Never having done anything ever but watch
and never having actually watched anything,

never having attended to anything but cloud
and never having touched one or learned

its numbers or colors or rightful names
(except once on the slopes above Darjeeling

I wore out into the morning and breathed you in,
mother of atmosphere, green air,

eternity, vagrant, the monsoon
had brought you and I took you entirely in)

I call you cloud and call myself yours.


Robert Kelly

Posted over on Nicolle Peyrafitte

Song: For Those Who Come After

SONG: FOR THOSE WHO COME AFTER


Learn the new way
whatever it is at all
the beginning and what will you do
the end and what is done

learn the green mistakes
your father fell
and when you young
are beautifully wrong

when they teach you
loving say No
say Yes in the middle of No
be kind in emptiness

no one knows anything
so believe them all
a style is seduction
and worth a kiss

but dont get married
learn ships and wind
and all ways to go
when the tongue leaves the mouth

and the sky is not just money
and the sea is mostly wet
and Anywhere Anywhere
your lovesong your anthem

and Everywhere Everywhere
should be your mother
ask nothing but to give
and never remember

what you'll never forget
a bright road running
when you want nothing
and there is no different from here.


Robert Kelly

Posted over on Nicole Peyrafitte

Towards the Day of Liberation

Photograph by Ed Buziak


TOWARDS THE DAY OF LIBERATION


It doesnt matter what we see there
(the mouth is full of sense
no taste in listening
no sense to hear
what twists in the shallow water below the tongue)

(and if he says Listen! say
Drink the hearing with
your own ears, a word
is not to hear)

Language? To use language for the sake of
communication is like using a forest of ancient
trees to make paper towels and cardboard boxes
from all those years the wind and crows danced
in the up of its slow.

A word is not to hear
and not to say -
what is a word?

The Catechism begins:
Who made you?
Language made me.
Why did It make you?
It made me to confuse the branch with the wind.
Why that?
To hide the root.
Where is the root?
It lies beneath the tongue.
Speak it.
It lies beneath the speech.
Is it a word?
A word is the shadow of a body passing.
Whose body is that?
The shadow's own.


Robert Kelly

Posted over on Nicole Peyrafitte