Twelfth Night

TWELFTH NIGHT


The dream people need me
and I need them. They come
and move outside the tent of sleep
I see their shapes moving
on the pale fabric wall, shades
cast by the dawn light
and I know they come for me again
I wake to inscribe their necessities
which are our histories, without them
I would not have a word in my mouth,
they bring a star this morning, and they bring
an old French province, a Belgian beer,
a person wanders naked in the woods
she uses her body to show the way, show
me the way, she shows and is the way.
Words if interrupted turn back into body,
she says Wake up, the phones are dead
the amaryllis blossoms in the dining room
so learn a new language every day
the more you know the more the clothing
falls away, it is a little Gnostic gospel,
it is a man frying fish for you beside the lake
blue as childhood and birds are there
no less blue, I know because it’s here
when I wake up, who else could bring
these things outside my window, could bring
the window for me to look through,
name the woman and tell me the language
that’s using both of us now, only seems
like mother tongue, it is brassy dialect
of somewhere else, some other god
crept onto the altar last night,
there is always another color hidden
inside what we see, like a girl with
an amber lozenge in her mouth
you’ll never know the taste of
till you kiss her but she runs away.
Support me by the fabric
I mean the factory of dream
by which we are clothed
and dare to walk along the road

from this town to another
without apology for our feebleness
nakedness, only two legs,
only two hands, how will I ever.
And that is the little glory of us
we have to invent calculus every day
and learn a new language
that calls itself Greek again
but this Plato is not like I remember
and his Socrates is nailed to a barn door
and his Alcibiades is a girl in the woods
running naked as a fox or a forgetting.


Robert Kelly

Posted over on Charlotte Mandell

from MAY DAY: Poems 2003-2004