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ROBERT KELLY   two poems

A Lithuanian Elegy             for Jonas Mekas     Mist mist my beauty lost I hear an old man talking   We must be woods Wise women tied ribbons to branches   The wind knows how to read So much water in this little river   Don't lose the old religion Moon We are strong because we need   Sometimes a father's older than his son Did you hear the sermon on the broken guitar   I have taught my daughter the names of trees Touch no one till the sun goes down   You saw a man bleeding on the river bank We wash and wash and never come clean   We know each other by the way we walk Red ribbons like strips of meat in the rain.   Dream debris   And when there's nothing left there's you you cast a shadow that makes me. The dreadful two of us again, mother and son, father and daughter, broken down the middle like an old barn, christ, owls and woodchucks live therein and all the bad birds celebrate their spring   but it's australia down in here, a metal language and faces with big pores staring straight into the sun, where money lives shaped like a golden phallus. But not a man's cock. Some other kind, girl dong or cloud prick or the pointy shadow of the moon so bright we gasp and say The Sun, that's where it comes from, that mist is me,   (the sun is the shadow of the moon. meaning is the shadow of desire.)   That light suffusing mist is thee, pardner, hot-hipped and sore all about from Aphrodite's lucidest negotiations. All flesh wants you because your mind.       Robert Kelly's latest book of poems is "The Time of Voice" from Black Sparrow, which collects poems from 1994 to 1996. His "Mont Blanc," a textual invasion (or interpenetration) done in collaboration with the late Percy Shelley, is available from Other Wind Press (Ann Arbor). In September 1999 a collaborative project, "The Garden of Distances," made up of poems responding to the drawings of the painter Brigitte Mahlknecht, will be published in Italy. Two other collaborations, with the film maker and poet Amie Siegel, are in progress: "Glass" and "Contra Dances." Robert Kelly is working on a fifth collection of prose fictions, and teaches regularly in the writing program at Bard College in New York State.

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