20 September 2013

As soon as it comes home
it will be me
again or for the first time
who can decide
out here where the trees
publish so many
variations on the same news
the way we music.

from RK's Traubenritter Maxims

This gentle clack of billiard balls on the green felt behind me makes me think of the endless rolling and occasional collisions of asteroids, spread out along the ecliptic mostly, or rogues in free space tumbling along rebel orbits of their own. We pass unscathed through their geometries. Or do we? Do those bodies too (as the ancients surmised about the canonical planets) cast influences our way, subtle shifts of love and aversion and indifference, so that by them also our moods (those vagrant beasts who live our lives for us) are shaped?

BOOK

The opera of the faraway

like a Victorian children’s book

I hear voices inside the word

of old adventurers, their lions,

glaciers, killer whales,

the green of Shalimar

blood-spattered as with roses,

the opera of all we never knew

here in our trembling hands.

Robert Kelly reads at T/Space, the art space of architect Steven Holl, in Rhinebeck NY, 7 September 2013

Robert Kelly reads at T Space

HYMN TO ZEUS

The flirtations of Zeus

have no boundary.

Lightning runs down the solitary tree,

fire loves the wood of it

we think, but in truth

fire loves this secret water

deep inside each thing.

The water hidden

in the crystals of steel,

water in the wood, sap rising

to meet Jupiter rushing down

to the water in us.

II.

That is Zeus.

Makes girls and boys out of everything

his power makes us who we are

as once on Helicon

he seemed to take a fancy

to a chubby little shepherd

ripe on the altar of puberty and

rushed down from heaven

to plant one scorching kiss on those rude lips

so ever after that young swain made

song whenever he tried to speak

so his plainest hello could

thrill the hearts of all the shepherdesses,

Genesis of poetry.                   

III.

“the swan was before we were married”

says Jove to Juno in Offenbach’s Orphée aux Enfers

history changes day by day —

no one knows what comes before

because feeling is always and only right now

and history has no heart to feel.

The Swan also is tomorrow.

IV.

Was there even time to answer them

before the air came down

— who made the air? —

to lock our snug atmosphere around us

safe so we could breathe?

But we weren’t we yet,

we had to get born from crystals of air

— why a man has a chip of ice

deep in his every heart —

and learned to wrap a silk of skin

around a mass of air.

A net of blood to carry it.

It’s a guess

to call our father’s name.

Zeus gave us the weather,

ta metarsia

so let us praise Zeus.

Dia. Accusative case of God. 

It’s time for me to start

reading every book again.

For him if not for me.

V.

Me, I look out the window

I see the air.

What can be wrong with me

that I can see the air?

The outside calls

to the inside,

air inside me too

solemn as Tennyson

blood-journeying oxygen,

caravaning its way through the frail brain.

My hungry eyes, my hungry eyes.

VI.

Hymn to Zeus.

He sees us when he looks down

when we do something

worth his notice,

some offering or some public iniquity—

the beauty of Zeus is this:

he does not know what we’re thinking.

And all the forms Zeus takes

rejuvenate the human race —

the swan of our grace, the gold

in the mercy of our eyes,

our eagle wit — he pours

the beast-god stuff in,

our genome rises to adore.