by Jack Kelly
I
The skies ache with snow –
with forever-weeks
of white castings.
When the sun breaks through,
she enlightens mine soul, warms
my skin after so many hours
sitting
with mine back to the winds –
O mine fingers are numb,
face-flesh numb, blue-eyes
watery,
O the cold-ache
of mine eyes –
II
I feel myself growing
in the sun’s heat,
I feel myself coming alive as
the red-flower’s petals
expand.
I am the green spring’s bud,
waiting for the frost to cease,
waiting in a blanket of skin,
smooth, impenetrable, lovely,
soft and velvety –
waiting to unsheathe and
open wide,
revealing myself
unto the tall-reaching trees
bending
with the winds,
showing myself
to the pine needles fallen,
to the crisp-dry grasses
now pale,
dying on the surface
but alive
beneath the frozen ground,
ready to lift up toward
the tops
and breach: new-birth, born,
rejuvenation –
III
I pray to Christ,
peaceable, understanding,
doleful dark eyes,
ironed, crossed,
thorn-crowned,
leaking love’s blood –
Pouring from his lips
are souls, redemption,
fallibility:
the herd of water-cattle
protect their young
and infirm kin,
black-skinned, horned,
quiet-eyed but driven
furious
by the lioness
seeking
a bite:
a claw in the flesh,
exorcising the spirit,
draining the spirit.
The oxen-souls are above the herd,
floating, heroic,
brimming to the starry heavens,
against the black of night,
against the growing cold
of night-winds howling
through
the silhouettes
of trees –
IV
I pray to Buddha, recumbent,
sitting forever below
the boughs of a tree,
listening to the river-waters
lapping against
the grasses,
against
other waters,
singing
the dribble-dribble
ripples.
He, not knowing himself,
wonder-wanders
about the mind,
forgets his body,
displaces his weight,
loosens
the tired joints:
the knee-joints, the back,
the arthritic-locked fingers.
He casts aside the hut
of timber and stone –
he forgets his hunger,
he rises from
his skin and bone
and red sinew-flesh,
veins and fingernail.
He becomes the Earth,
catches the Nirvana-wisps
within his soft palms.
He cups it, carries
his free-flying self
over the rocky deserts,
the grasses and
limber forests
rolling about the bases
of blue-mountains capped with
snowy-peaks:
bright, catching the light of
the rising sun,
red and heated –
V
I pray to Muhammad, the indistinct,
energetic, ascendant –
his body and face atomized,
permeating,
clear-flowing,
divisible,
evanescent and sagacious:
his songs are in the airs,
in the tunes,
in the rhythmic beauties,
in the sounds of ten-thousand
children singing
his name, breathing in
his voice
and releasing
his mind
as the arrow splits-free
from the bow,
taut-stringed, curved,
beautifully polished,
darkwood of rarity,
playing, caressing
through the airs,
rising ten-thousand miles above
Medina and
Jerusalem,
fingers brushing past
all of Asia,
the East, the West,
touching all souls wandering
‘round the Earth, reflecting
themselves
in his solemn gaze,
his guiding hand,
his hold upon my body –
he rushes by me
in a pulse,
scattering through the tree-tops,
along the beach-sands,
through the desert-lands and
clay-cities,
along the tracks
of wooden carts
and roads
of one-thousand years
towing purple wine
and flowers,
seeds, wheat,
slender blue-fish
sold within
the market-places,
alleys,
children tapering away, the distance,
scampering so lightly
to their mothers,
brushing through
the cloth-veiled doorways,
rushing to
their beds,
waking in the night,
reading by the flame of light
the rumblings of God.
VI
Feel my body
wading down
the river,
feel my heels click
against the rocks,
dark, the many colored rocks –
follow mine body wading by
the banks, watch me
in the grasses
peeking.
Watch mine eyes glow
with the sunlight.
Hear the Earth
close shut.
A wooden door
creaks open and
the black-night gown
falls down
upon our heads.
The Earth is cool –
the river gives off
an air, a chill.
Her bending-down
and showing
and kissing
is all over.
The night-locusts sing
with the summertime-thrush,
bursting sounds
from their wings
and black claws
and black mandibles.
VII
Hold mine hand
as I hold you
in the black.
Crawl up to mine chest,
lay down with me
in the weeds, amongst
the pebbled shore
of ten thousand-thousand
stones.
Watch me
beneath the bridge
undress
and immerse –
Let’s baptize
ourselves –
VIII
I will crucify
myself
for you.
I’ll pay mine pound of flesh
for your sin,
and my sins
will be
with yours –
We’ll drop
our skins
into the dark waters;
our meat
will sweat
off the bone and
dabble downwards toward
the rivers, to the seas.
You and I shall dance beneath
these one-hundred tracks
for trains, these
scuttles of lumber,
stone,
and coal billowing
from the lungs,
burning,
spitting upwards
ash
high into the sky-night,
the star-night.
Yea, we’ll dance
for a instant near
the ice-breakers, by
the stone-cobbled bases
holding up
the iron-rust beams –
Baby, we’ll dance
as skeletons and then
fall apart –
Our bones fall to piles,
and our piles turn to dust.
Our bones fall down
the steps
and to the rivers,
mixing, congealing.
You and I give
our echo-laughs,
one more time.
The gravestones are set,
but we’re not yet
ready to sleep –
Baby-rattle with mine bones,
don’t bring me home
just yet,
mine love.
IX
Our children’s seeds
will give but more seeds
to the seas,
blue and green
and dark.
As bright as the moon’s ashen face
bears down
upon us,
I sing to you
forever, eternity,
you and me,
dissolving
to our
atoms and
molecules –
X
Adam and Eve dissolute, reforming,
beginning again
in ten-million places,
carried in the faces
of all Men – carried
within the dirt,
within the oceans;
the blue-eyed fish,
the whales-mammoth,
the birds and gulls –
even our mighty Paumanok
will fall
to the seas.
But do not fear –
The cups and clay vessels
we carry (our bodies)
are but reflections
in a mirror,
glints of sunlight
shooting ‘cross a room –
Do not fear,
We live –
XI
Kiss me,
you know
we are but shadows-
manifest –
fleshed hands might
well be as airs-
invisible,
for we are made
invisible
in time.
And invisible-hands do make us,
take us,
creates us
within images,
illusions:
Against the pallet
and grandiosity
of ten trillion-trillion
stars burning –
you and I
are but conscious specks
of dust.
XII
Kiss mine bones
as we fall to
the riverwaters below,
kiss me and
hold me as we
fall to the waters
below.
When our white skeleton-
dance ends,
what’s left is but
the splash of skulls
against
the rippling tides,
tides forever moving,
on and on,
without us, mine love,
I love you so –
XIII
What music plays?
What flute flutters
its keys upon the winds,
throughout this gentle valley,
along these river-cataracts?
What draws me to you,
further toward
the deepest recesses,
the caves,
the snowed-mountains?
I am carried by instinct-purely.
I’m carried by your scent,
floating, supine,
lifted upon
the rolling fogs, taken
by the shadows,
shadows lunging
from trunk to trunk;
the trees listlessly sway,
escaping
the puerile moon,
escaping
myself.
XIV
Mine face in the mirror
is a ghost
casting back
to me
mine gaze;
slowly
I become
unreal,
I blur,
I deteriorate –
I become as tangible as
the dirt and
the resin
of willow trees
drooping their lacy towels,
mossy, fuzzed,
gentle – opaque.
My mind flies away
from mine soft
hands
as a white feather
flies away.
O Mine trembling hands –
O the cold-thought! –
You can breed and remake
new flesh and bone
and briny blood –
But the mind, the spirit,
is unsalvageable,
gone,
never again
to witness the brimming fields
of apple orchards,
the miles of grasses
dazzling
in thy light.
No, the spirit
goes numb
and joins
the earth,
again.
I am alive but once
in the history
of this Earth,
of this ‘verse –
O Earth Immense,
Black-Space
Imperceptible –
XV
O How I wish
others question
themselves as
the deer
and the fox
and the rabbit
rove throughout
the woodlands,
throughout
the constellations,
treading in
the waters of the bay,
treading beneath
the pall
of starry-sky
and winter –
cold, silent, creaking, harsh,
numbing, beautiful, cognizant,
questioning –
O the serene groves of mine body,
place, time, future –
O the serene recognition of pasts,
of myself past –
XVI
Little does Man give ear
to the whispers
of the streamlined-fish,
whose lips endlessly speak
candor, peace,
and presence,
majesty –
the language of the lands and
kingdoms of the seas,
indecipherable,
innately known,
inexpressible –
XVII
The black stallion with
spits of white color
neighs
in the chill
of autumn.
The bright sun warms
the cold-aches,
the airs.
The consummated tree,
disrobed of leaf, life –
and of the loving
summer breezes
(cricket-songs) –
settles into the slumber
of winter,
of drear-skies,
of dread-storms
piling up to thy neck
frost, ice, snow –
XVIII
The stallion mutters
a few words
under his breath;
mine whisperer sings
the guttural chants
and rumblings of
heavy lungs
ready to shoot
across the fields,
pounding the sweet grasses
with hooves,
striking the wooden posts,
the wood-fence,
bounding over
the barriers,
leaping forth and escaping
into the wild-lands –
escaping to fields
of cherries
and apricot,
and of blued-berries –
forever
nourishing thyself
upon the roots
of nature,
growing, expanding,
greening,
living amongst
wild folk
without cloth,
naked and free,
catching the food
with strings
bound and twined –
hemp-nettings,
resting in a blanket of leaves,
auburn, ruddy, and golden –
Occasionally spotting
a bright yellow leaf,
soft, lovely, alive,
silken,
caring –
You touch the leaf
upon your face and feel
the stuff of the gods,
scripture,
and the ancient
temples
aligned
to the stars.
You feel your ancestors watching
the bare sky,
unadorned with
fluorescent light
and chimney-smoke,
embers
flying
in the winds –
of ten-thousand thatched roofs,
red-bricks,
white chalk,
and streaming dark vines
crawling up
thy walls,
up to thy
hair and eyes
and ears –
You feel for the first time
the gaze of your wild-being,
your animal-being.
Stripped of all human endeavor
and accretion,
you are
your birthright:
To be of the natural earth,
without language,
with only words –
You speak so softly
and yet so powerfully
to the sky –
The stars shake
with your speak,
the moon breaks
in your speak –
and scuttles over the horizon,
chases away
from your might;
secretly glancing back,
she whispers,
“Thy intellect
will ruin you.”
XIX
O How the Earth
bleeds life
as trees
drop fruit,
liquor –
I drink mine mind
to this sense.
I wish to ascend
as the osprey ascends
so easily
with open wings –
a simple swish
of limbs and off
she goes
‘cross the wash
of oceans
and glistening
sands.
Up to the sun
she flies
and far away she goes,
high and higher,
screeching down
to the earth
her battle-cry.
The Hunt is on and
the many-little swallows
fly in form,
black bodies, minute,
red-crested, white-crested
little things
whizzing by,
escaping the talons,
escaping
the stabbing beak.
O the dark,
sharp,
dead-eye
slips
of wing
crashing down upon
little bodies!
She, the osprey, carries
the broken-boned
meat
to the nests
of her young –
youth devours, devours –
XX
O The swallows make such a fight!
One flees the talons,
three others support
from behind
as if to chase
the menace
with their presence!
Desperately aiding,
one little black swallow
flies
in chase –
Each cries
to the others
along
the tree-line –
communicating
in furtive hushes,
seeking to keep
the death
at bay –
XXI
The Old Fathers Rise,
knowing their time is near,
and they bid farewell
to their wives
and sisters –
they bid farewell
to their brothers.
Fights pitched against
the coming of the night,
torches alight,
eyes brimming
with bravery-feats,
pounding the skies,
chanting,
escaping beneath
the bay’s reeds
and bursting forth
again
into the battle-fray!
Wing against wing,
sound against sound,
shield-clatter, swords buckling –
spears broken!
The crash of brass-cymbals,
the war-drums beating,
faster and faster,
the beat of war!
The charge and the crush,
the fallen fighting
by hand,
fingers in the eyes,
the bite of white teeth,
the kicks and rolls
in the grasses,
the lying prone,
the de-limbed,
the castrated,
the whimpering,
the holding-together
of hands –
The cold-dressings of death,
the darkness of death,
the valiant defense,
the sauntering,
the keeping of
the flame,
the hiding amongst
the rocks, the harvest,
the stealing away of brothers, sons,
the theft, the theft, the theft!
The cry, the wail,
the knees upon pews,
the hands begging
every day henceforth,
forgiveness –
Stop! –ask forgiveness!– drink –
bless – pray – O Take the wine! –
And the bread
you must break
for all thy years –
