How Pindar Works

HOW PINDAR WORKS


His ode is like a
haiku with a hole in it

the hero falls through
falls upward through the dawn wind
of his own coming to be,
coming with words in his mouth and some bright
shining thing in his hand,
how well he uses what he has or what he is,
the genetic calculus scatters backward
patter of gravel
falling with apparently no pattern
but a hero rises
like a river from the rock
like a hawk hammering the sky
backwards, backwards
from great consequences
intuit a tergo simplex causes
as he beats back through his millennium
grace by grace, for was he not in fact
the one old Lincoln had in mind
when he wished
one day in Illinois to be a girl instead
and wear starched dimity and tell lies
that would make the preacher blush
and switch through the sexes
through the tenses through the doors
until every room on earth belonged
to his light tread
and have done (pour en finir) with all
the useful lies of politics forever,
Abramendax, who split
our country so bloody deep
we still make the mirror crack and bleed
when he looks into it,
o it is vengeance enough to be born
and not everyone God loves is born
with rubies studding his bassinette
and a snake
crushed in his little hands

and yet the hero is, snake after snake
until the stars
relent and daylight comes, he falls forward now
into the blue aorist of distance,
a yachtsman conniving with bootleggers
fetching raunchy rum to Amagansett
where the blondes are, ditzy by the pool
in the filmy eternity of women’s clothes,
Achilles, Lincolnetta, all the glory-dazzled
travesties that live for war, girls on Harleys,
ladies eyelined
choking the chill stems of martinis
and then a birth or two later
he’s in our age
pounding doubles off the wall at Fenway
or scalawagging budget lines through Washington
a scarlet story and man among men,
a wound made by music,
that heals in our hearts.



Robert Kelly

Posted over on Charlotte Mandell

from MAY DAY: Poems 2003-2005