A Theory of Leaf Management

A THEORY OF LEAF MANAGEMENT


Don’t have to call anybody today
the Saturday leaves relax the lawn.
Lawn is a human word
a mere
colonial attitude, who owns the green
one wants a superior machine
and a schoolboy learning a fountain pen
a schoolgirl singing to her backpack
one needs a lot of time
and that’s all time is, a lot of it
continuously going nowhere fast,
there must be a machine
that works better than a fountain pen
it’s Saturday the schoolboy
learns to kiss the schoolgirl by thinking
before he gets out of bed about it
one sleeps in a bed one walks
upon a lawn, ownership is evident
in all human affairs, the practice
of the heart is hard practice,
sophomores,
one owns actually nothing
and even one’s bones are only loans.
The hands he plans to touch her with
are no more his than she is hers ―
this is what the leaves would be thinking
as they rustle towards universal
consciousness though they are kalpas
away from it still,
leaves on the wife’s
flowerbed where the dwarf salvias
which have been red since early June
finally lost their scarlet blossoms
soon ago while one’s back was turned,
don’t have to call they come
at a touch the plant is closed

the worker bees are god knows where
soldiering up the foothills of winter
with ominous expectations,
Plutarch
has nothing to say about their case,
whatever autumn is an omen for
and why can’t people read what
anything means, let alone bees,
but who after all is asking,
the leaves are easy, flowers dead,
bees gone, birds well fed,
the schoolboy examines his fingertips
to see if any trace of who he touched
is still left there to drive the fountain pen
in some interesting direction
rape or rapture or dog with something
in its teeth the way words do one writes
with one’s fountain pen and the ink
is blue and the sky goes away every night
and there one is alone with meager skills,
her back was turned to him, she didn’t see
the way he stared at her belly when
the bare midriff currently in fashion
revealed skin and shaped one’s mind
to the interesting body of the other
but away from the sexual machinery
towards this tender yielding tummy meat
no questions asked, here
there are no explanations, he plans
to bury his little face in her
some day not soon to come when
all the stars are right again or when
his stupid pen runs out of ink,
maybe the schoolboy thinks he could
become the schoolgirl’s backpack
and nestle amatively close against
the gentle scoliosis of her small
like Charles Fourier penning a treatise,
one owns no ideas of one’s own, one’s all
ideas tend to own one or so the analysts

of the inevident wrote down a century ago
in violet ink or in Vienna with fountain pens
still status symbols on their way to
the elucidation of what such animals dream
as the smallest god of all redeems their sleep
from common property and owning it,
one’s neurosis one’s symptoms one’s cure
interminably deferred across the decades
over Bifrost the myth between here and now
and somewhere godly else,
that bridge
is broken now, but the schoolboy’s lust
has enough ink left in it to thrust
the rusty girders up against the sky
and build that bridge again, and from her side
the schoolgirl of the actual will build
to meet her phantom other, Other To Her
is that span’s name, they may join
somewhere above the Skagerrak say,
between a self and a self there is nothing
to decide, certainly no narrative, no
universal consciousness, no moon, no
backpack dangling from no moon,
no back caressed by his impostor fingers,
the state of this art has no neighbors,
only certain grumpy ink-stained Trolls
who live beneath any bridge, even
the newest, beneath the blue glossy
warpaint of the steel superstructure
go ahead, shame the sky with bright ideas,
already shiny cars can roll from New
Amsterdam rabbiting south
to sleep this night she thinks he plans
in the virgin hardwood forests of Elk
Neck across the river from New Sweden
where Gott sei Dank! there is a bridge already,
not everything has to be built from scratch
but it’s Saturday, her back feels lonely
uncaressed, no backpack, no school, no moon,
no words except the ones she wishes,

the words she wishes one would send
coarsely scribbled with one’s tyro fountain pen
but schoolboys like scarlet flowers of the sage
are kalpas away from saying what they mean.


Robert Kelly

Posted over on Charlotte Mandell

from MAY DAY: Poems 2003-2005