This category is for those pieces of writing (excerpts, novels, poems, plays, flash fiction, etc., etc.) that I’ll never write but would gladly string myself up on a tree for nine full nights to have written.
Robinson
The dog stops barking after Robinson has gone.
His act is over. The world is a gray world,
Not without violence, and he kicks under the grand piano,
The nightmare chase well under way.
The mirror from Mexico, stuck to the wall,
Reflects nothing at all. The glass is black.
Robinson alone provides the image Robinsonian.
Which is all of the room–walls, curtains,
Shelves, bed, the tinted photograph of Robinson’s first wife,
Rugs, vases panatelas in a humidor.
They would fill the room if Robinson came in.
The pages in the books are blank,
The books that Robinson has read. That is his favorite chair,
Or where the chair would be if Robinson were here.
All day the phone rings. It could be Robinson
Calling. It never rings when he is here.
Outside, white buildings yellow in the sun.
Outside, the birds circle continuously
Where trees are actual and take no holiday.
- Weldon Kees
Love how the poem is a series of snapshots of an empty room before panning outside. Robinson himself is an absence, something intangible throughout the poem while the objects (the dog, the mirror, book, etc.) are immediately present, yet inactive and sterile; every object is still in the process of becoming, yearning towards its definition, rather than being. It can only be Robinson’s favourite chair if Robinson is there to define it by. Every page in Robinson’s book is blank until Robinson reads his interpretation to it. Love how Kees paints the room first visually and then aurally with the phone. The repetition of ‘rings’ in consecutive lines emphasizes the sound of it.
With that last stanza though, Kees furnishes his dialectic of inside/outside realities. The buildings, the birds and the trees exist in a reality separate from that of Robinson. There define themselves yellowing in the sun, circling continuously, being “actual” with no reprieve from this beingness. This is the outside reality which contains Robinson as Robinson contains the reality of the room he inhabits. In the buildings, the birds and the trees, Robinson finds his meaning just as in Robinson, his rooms acquires meaning.
That’s my half-baked reading of it any way. I doubt I’m equipped to comment on the sonics of the piece. It’s a poem with strong images and few aural elements standing out.
The poem can be found online here.
Also check out a curious study of Weldon Kees, his influence on poets and the lack of academic attention to his work here.
