Your Dark Red Cape

YOUR DARK RED CAPE

for C

Because you are quiet, love, and dignified
but now chorus happens and old Italian men
in undershirts on city stoops begin to sing
no reason for anything, eat an orange,
God is a leper we hurry past in the street,
music sticks to us like the smell of adultery
one brings home fearful of detection
on one’s clothes. Confused. Music confuses,
the grammar gets lost, the tower sings,
somebody sets somebody’s brother on fire,
the playground fills with terrorists,
we don’t know, we just don’t know.
Sometimes it sounds like Auden, doesn’t it,
that Homer of one thing after another, nothing
much mattered but all of it does, terribly,
the inuring, the summing up, nine of them
singing all at once, end of Act One, Rossini
flees by night to Paris, trying to find
something he doesn’t know how to do.
Something all his own.
Something they can’t sing.


Robert Kelly

Posted over on Charlotte Mandell

from MAY DAY: Poems 2003-2005