Bliss, a poem by Robert Kelly in The Wolf issue 25

Bliss is a single unbroken poem by Robert Kelly, printed in the twenty-fifth issue of The Wolf. It is written without stanza breaks, as a continuous stream of thought in which side remarks, questions and bracketed asides keep interrupting the main line. The voice is conversational, teasing and learned by turns, and it addresses a lover or companion who is told more than once to roll over and talk.

The poem begins by turning over the word of its title, which the speaker treats as something cold and used up, and moves outward from there. References gather from several directions: classical architecture, ancient rhetoric and a Greek word for a bird that draws a chariot, a Celtic neck ornament, an offhand claim that love resembles algebra, and a passing remark on liberty and Arabic. Cleopatra returns near the end as a figure of intelligence, chemistry and language, someone who might still be alive in the right climate. Alongside such learned play the poem keeps coming back to ordinary things: coffee in the morning, flowers in a vase that nobody counts, a long icicle, stubble on a chin, children waiting for politics to finish, birds tired of their own noise.

Several ideas recur. Beauty is called innumerate, because people never count the petals. Mornings carry the echo of music heard the night before. Touch and foreignness are linked, and the closing questions wonder whether a night with a lover has simply never ended. The effect is of a mind thinking aloud, forever correcting itself.

Work

Bliss

Author

Robert Kelly

Poems in this selection

• Bliss