Untitled: RK V

Untitled: RK V


Imagine the other side of poetry,
what you’d see if you look back at us
through that glass, us standing here
like nervous lovers in a glum hotel
in some famous capital we’ve read about
all our lives and here it is outside
all round us and the column with the admiral
on it casts his shadow in this very room,
we are a part of history after all, touch me,
I am real, we make each other somehow
into something accurate if small,
the long shadow of the admiral lays
itself down across our very bed
where one of us smokes and one of us
waits but for what, since everything
is here already, everything done?


Robert Kelly

Posted over on Charlotte Mandell

from MAY DAY: Poems 2003-2005