The Poor Land of Tyrol

THE POOR LAND OF TYROL


I must be close to dying since the water
tastes like wine
the moon is as bright as the sun
and the sun is in my arms
it isn’t normal to see wind
and different countries passing by
but what is not normal knows how to be natural
everybody laughing everybody in tears
and the window flushes with foreignness
and everything is here even the cities,
even the people
I dream about are around me when I wake
I see them coming over the hill
wolves trotting in and out of their steps
and half a dozen blue jays scream bonjour.
*
What do I know about music,
it’s years since I tasted water
even longer since I tasted wine
the moon is a kukri these nights
those curved knives the Gurkas use
you can buy in mountain markets
and I can stare into the sunlight the way
I never could before as if I knew how
to live in this place
things keep sending me messages
I bestir myself to read
but sometimes I would rather sleep
or cast horoscopes for unknown men
mapping the space between their eyes
onto Gesenius’s edition of the Torah

chanting out loud what wisdom comes
pouring from the eyes of strangers
and what does this one really know
she knows everything left out of the Bible,
Rembrandt was ashamed to show her since
beauty has nothing to do with what we do
and we have to keep doing doing
is the dog that chases us
and watches with those loving Irish eyes
all dogs have them bliss or bite,
it’s all just a machine and the whole system
folds up into your pocket
because the circumference is nowhere
as the Bishop of Brixen remarked
coming down over the Brenner Pass
entering the valley of the ice cold river
they call Etsch.
*
If he kept going he’d get to Bolzano
like Musil and Schnitzler and me
where we duly fell in love with the stone elephant
in the hotel park, Italian moonshine
and guitars insist on playing im dunklen Laub
the way they always are in poetry,
ardor and boredom and at night we ride
to German-speaking pizzerias in the vineyards
doubting God and arguing about Dante
just like those who are still alive.
Because everything you think here comes to life.
It is a property of the clear blue water
in the little Karersee
that the yellow flowers deep in it
do not at all turn green.


Robert Kelly

Posted over on Charlotte Mandell

from MAY DAY: Poems 2003-2004