Collaboration with Robert Kelly
for Linda Cassidy
Once I was a child
I was a parachute
I was a hundred soldiers
floating down the sky
on blossoming parachutes
reading their bibles
as they kept falling
into a war with no guns
a war that was just the land fighting with itself
yellow fields of mud
yellow fields of corn
shallow hills and steep
ravines and there we were
up to our ankles in earth
looking for some horizon
seeing only ancient
temples crumbling stonetemples with no gods
in them and there we were
and there we were
and then I was alone
no guns no gods
just walking slowly
beneath my sky
from which I claim
to have come down
the sky that knew me
once but not now
who knows me now
who knows me now
who knows me
now when my hands
reach empty out
into the empty air
and all I feel is the struggling
ground beneath me,
warm Earth, melting amber
of the Earth reaching up to me reaching out to me
as I reach to it
oh who am I now
who am I now?
3.XII.24
On a Monotype by Linda Cassidy
The girls of the prophets
are playing in the street
turning circles, spinning round each other, through each other
and fast, bodies bending
to touch the ground
leaping up to touch the sky,
oh their skins are different
closely written, dense
with words fresh spoken
from the prophets’ visions,
wisdoms, words they heard
whether understood or not—
for everything the father says
is somehow recorded in his infant’s skin, the pattern
hidden in the pores, the bend
of tendon, curve of thigh,
a child grows up and those
who look at her
see her but see at once
that she is listening deeply
to some text a they too
yearn to hear, that voice,
worth a whole life to read.
To LCB’s monoprint
No picture has a we
in it, only a me and a you.
The seer and the seen.
And yet when I looked away
I saw we had been dancing
in the snow, whoever we were.
Are. Safely apart from weather
and what is make who do.
I looked away until I saw
no one had been dancing
and not every white is snow,
It wasn’t till I closed my eyes
did I see what I had seen—
I saw that we are only
as we move, I saw the curl
of nerve tissue that sweeps
up into mind and busies it
with miracles. We hear, we see!
And movement leaves its traces.
Kierkegaard half-boasted
half-wept that he does not
dance but the picture sternly
comforts him—you dance,
little Dane, you dance all right,
all night worms, those nerves,
swerve about in your brain.
Strange word, we say understand but to know anything at all
is to move with, keep moving.
No wonder I thought we
had been dancing! You left
footsteps all over my mind.