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Long over, what's on the tree shivers. Sky hides behind white-faced, giving flesh to branch, a red leaf or yellow far enough away, what Broch called ''the style of old age," simplified of images, lean in the perfection of the bough, naked & half-undone. Clouds break, rain against a hidden sun, the form plain
From Red Actions: Selected Poems 1960-1993. Copyright © 1995 by Robert Kelly. Used by permission of the author.
Orpheus can never look back at the real woman trailing behind him out of hell, the woman that anybody could see with ordinary eyes. Orpheus must keep his eyes firmly fixed on the imaginal Eurydice before him, towards whom he has struggled all his life. She is not imaginary, not at all, but realer than any mere apparency, than any momentary act of seeing. He must move always towards that perfect image of his wife, and so sustain himself and his song. If ever he turns back, that is, regresses into seeing his wife as an ordinary woman, she is lost. And he is lost.
Science explains nothing but holds all together as many things as it can count science is a basket not a religion he said a cat as big as a cat the moon the size of the moon science is the same as poetry only it uses the wrong words.
Once when I read the funnies I took my little magnifying glass and looked too close. Forms became colors and colors were just arrays of dots and between the dots I saw the rough bleak storyless legend of the pulp paper empty as the winter moon and I dreaded it. I had looked right through, when I wanted a universe that sustains looker and looking and the seen forever, detail after detail never ending. And all I had found was between. But between had its own song: Find it in the space between— it is just as empty as it seems but this blankness is your mother.