Nine Bagatelles

NINE BAGATELLES


First I was dying then I was dead.
Before all that I remember nothing,
he said, something hurt me like a color
then it was gone and a lull came on.
How was the journey for you, he said.
*
Foundering despots look for help
from poets and sentimentalists.
Bhang-crazed Sufis sit around
in Cairo mourning King Farouk.
The sun cracks on any pyramid
and Thales’ celebrated water flows
out of the egg of time. River,
river, all my days one poet rants.
Another sneers at such drivel then
wonders if he didn’t just say it himself.
*
(Conversation Among Roses)
I was always the one who left,
before the touch grew cold
and the words thickened
on all sides with explanations
nobody needed and nobody
believed. Only the gullible flowers
in their vases live so quick
a life that love outlives them.
*
But I held the spindle
in my left hand
and wound like woman
my life around the stick
and this was my torch
that led me while I slept
under waterfalls and walked
along the narrow path
between the eyelid and the eye.

*
But what they touched
came later, brushed
against the coats hung in the hallway
and spoke with each one
a man’s weather stays in his clothes
and answers in his absence
when a wise man asks
He had hurt himself with listening
He went out of his mind’s way
to taste the other road
the dust of it still on his tongue:
what language is.
*
Language is the muttering of slaves
bent to their oars churning
a dark ship through incomprehensible seas.
*
Folding trees up
neatly into treatises,
translate the whole argument
back into Greek
insoluble because the birds
that sang to Anaximenes
have changed their chromosomes
and walk among us now.
Philosophy is the science of forgetting.
*
God is what flees before us
and makes us follow, hurrying
past the church and through the market,
past money and past river,
past all the foreign languages,
church bells, cute students
of dead sciences, parks,
fields, prairies, seas,
hum of bees around the empty hive.
*
Ralegh in the night before his execution
wrote his thousand-page History of the World
dedicated to the queen
who sentenced him to die


Robert Kelly

Posted over on Charlotte Mandell

from MAY DAY: Poems 2003-2005