Silver Sunset

by Robert Kelly

see,
abashed at all
our Spartan propaganda
(less is more; hurt helps)
the opulent evening
unfolds.
We see the silver
sprinkle us as rain,
asperges me, Domine,
we cry to the Lord
by which we mean the all,
the wise totality that rules us,
and we fall on our minds’ knees
the bones we call sleep.

2.
Then it was day.
The confused liturgies of dream
talked themselves out.
Anaphora, what we repeat.
Wake renewed from the same old dark.
So now it is day,
soft and cool for the season,
the sky looks as if remembering
the storms of last night.
Yes, weather has a memory, too,
we see it in the trees too.

3.
Walk with me some day
through a few lines of Homer,
the most famous ones,
about this raging foreigner
who came to wreck a city,
helping other angry men
who had no city of their own.
Wreck the city and leave
food for the dogs and birds,
beasts who commonly eat
carrion or what they kill
now given by those angry men
dinners of luxurious fresh meat.
pf boys and men, blond and brown,
bodies spread on the blood–soaked ground.
Angry men from Europe
who come to sack a city in Asia —
sound familiar
Even history has enough sense
to call the book Iliad, the poem
about Troy, not some weird
Achileid. No wonder Alexander
had it carried into battle,
help the angry man defeat society.

4.
Forgive the lecture,
I was just looking out the window
when it began. Sorry,
morning should be lesson enough.

5.
Sometimes one squirms
out of dream into something worse:
rational thinking without feeling.
That too is where war starts,
and detention camps fill up
along our borders, dumps
for children with the wrong color hair.

6.
Of course I forgive you,
you didn’t mean it —
but that should make me madder
than if you did.
You should at least know
what you’re doing
whatever you do.
Sprinkle me, o Lord, with consciousness.

7.
This is me still
trying to wake up.
Thousands of years
deep all sleep seems,
and every day a pure naissance,
nothing again about it.

8.
I love using words
like ebery and all,
they’re easy to spell
and make you mad,
make you search
fast for exceptions,
objections, tear holes
in my plausible absolutes.
That way you get to share the work,
striving along the road with me
to find what language means.

9.
Means today, I mean,
not some old book
I try to understand.
Today is an epic of its own,
we stumble through
its lean hexameters
wondering what dialect
we’re in this time.
Is this a line by Homer?
A haiku? Each has 17 syllables,
how can we know
what anything is
until we see what comes next.
Look far out to sea,
your eyes are better than mine,
what color are the sails
on that schooner on the horizon?
Or is that an osprey
settling on a much closer wave?

May 2021