An Elegy For Wolves

Painting by Steven M. Gardner


AN ELEGY FOR WOLVES


Everything will be with you already
all the while you go on waiting
there is another sturgeon swimming
peacefully towards you this second
her belly charged with eggs for you
you get to understand, knowledge is caviar
the old man said, swinging
his racket on the roof
testing once again (so many years)
the Ghibelline light. No one wants it
because when the General knows you have it,
you’re a marked woman, the old man said,
or man as it happens, you are a shadow
cast by candles on a gold mosaic wall
and you last no longer than the morning.
And there was snow in Venice this year
on the little bridge with
the Hebrew street sign
telling how you find the House of Study,
that fervent observation the others call
‘prayer.’
Snow on old tile, dangerous, snow
settling on water, a dream dreaming a dream.

This little book, questo librettino, I got it
from my German mother, my Jewish mother
as it happens if the truth be known,
o knowledge of all days compressed in this,
this night also
the snow is spoken, and so I read
Henry Menaced by Wolves; or, Prayer Never
Goes Unanswered, who knows who wrote it,
a long walk home he had of it,
not even counting the snowflakes,
their eyes all round him, their breaths
observable in every shrub
as little puffs of bluish steam
sifting through foliage, low to the ground,
the bushes breathing, and the boy decided
Mamma told me God is everywhere
so those are His eyes I see all round me
gold as His crucifixes hot as candle wax
I will not fear except with that praiseworthy
fear of God they say is proper
though I have never felt it yet, maybe this
is it now, since God is a baby in a manger
far littler than me, or God is an old man

bound and fettered, tied to a cross
and dying, pity and not terror
is what comes of that, but those yellow
eyes are on me now, they must be He,
how many eyes you have o Lord!
The better to behold you, sang the wolves
and waited.
I don’t recollect
what became of little Henry after that,
the old man said, the years have bound me
to this chair I made once for another,
and then they took my books away
across this interminable room, long
out of armshot, shadows for breakfast
and a bird on the roof of the garage
for lunch, is it time for my ravioli yet,
my glory?
His daughter was his wife.
The ambulance got lost on the canal,
no matter, he felt better after eating,
went to his desk and later managed
to play some tennis for a quarter-hour
lobbing the ball against the house wall
all alone, no one to play with, pale
Tyrolean sky, just his instruments alone
and the mosaic in which he stands
fixed for a thousand years but only
as a shadow is, until the next
dose of medicine goes down, Lenin calls,
Christmas trees thrown out after Candlemas,
their tinsel and angel hair still on them
cluttering the bonfires with threads of light.


Robert Kelly

Posted over on Charlotte Mandell

from MAY DAY: Poems 2003-2005