Orion: Opening the Seals

Robert Kelly

Opening the throat

What

sound can tell

or later

the letter

found letter, lost alphabet

the lost language                     in live lips

found.

?A

1.

A forehead or a brow

face,

a face

here, near to the speaker

be on my side

amor ti vieta

not to love me back

my face be near

be a sound so close to my face

I think I’m speaking

2.

for love is a high school of persuasion

a study in power

for I gave my power to him and he took

A is for Apple.

That is what she did,

gave her power away & he did take

and she takes back, now,

wiping her forehead from the sweat of the day

3.

her brow a storm cloud

new-bent in heav’n

across the speaker’s line of sight

deictic marker of something that is near

or being close. A is close, close to

who am I when I am speaking

when I find in my mouth something to say

and that is A.

Something is near to the speaker

as a bird is near to the sky

4.

I am part of what I say,

(one is a part of what one says)

I am your element

(one is made of what one says)

speak me free

(one can be liberated from what one seems to be

only by what one is, I suppose is what it means,

are you?)

5.

across the tops of some new leaves

just put out by the powerful hedges

I see a cleft or cranny in the rock wall

tall as a woman and shaped a little

like the space between

her two hands loosely held together

palm to palm

in the gesture often sold as “Hands, Praying”

made of painted plaster, based loosely but three

dimensionally on the celebrated drawing by the German

master Albrecht Dürer

who signed his pictures A

(with a little D beneath it and within it)

a father swallowed up inside his son.

6.

A as in prayer. A as in rock.

A open as in a throat

open to say your name.

Your name is power, Evening,

mother of all living,

your name is lightning, locker room,

your arthropod intelligence, chambered

up through the mammalian grease

to meet the milky light,

sky light of Hellas? Hell is a bright house

where a certain dark relief

spells out of the silence

a long, long word it takes eternity to read,

a word that probably turns out to be my name.

7.

(The sky was bright and empty over Lockerbie

one day I was there, got some money,

mailed some letters, bought a notebook—where did I

put it?—ate some lunch—and where is lunch

now, where are all the animals I ever ate,

burnt wreckage of desire strewn over Lockerbie,

when the wood fell out of the sky,

they say it exploded, or was exploded, but I say it broke,

the word broke and fell to earth,

the word of someone’s hatred finally spoke,

and over the supple hillsides of the dale of Annan

crap and clothes and body parts and inarticulate machinery,

you break a word when you speak it,

“silence once broken can never be mended.” —S. Beckett

8.

Of course A is longest, how could it not be,

in the first sound

all others are entered

also, the first word speaks all the others,

aleph, the opening,

the first word spoken, the original sin.

For sin is in the father’s bosom

and must be spoken out into the forgiving light

until the healing dark can claim it,

Father+Mother+Crucified Son (aleph, mem, tav) spell emeth, “truth”

9.

but as I was saying before sense obtruded

the cantilena hardly

ever pauses,

    my music will suck you till I die,

to make you everything, vast inanimate plural,

as if one human mind

were the same as a valley full of gravel,

vast finity of sand.

10.

Am here

   where you told me to be

to be who you are,

am here the first

leaf on your tree is me,

I am your family,

this dark indefinite question

questions you

you are my straight answer.

I believe that we can bring this from the mind.