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NEAR BELIEVING: Monologues and Narratives 1967-2021 represents  selections from Alan Wearne’s previous collections and is already acclaimed as a remarkable achievement.

POEM OF THE MONTH:

The Robinson Poems Part 2

by WELDON KEES

Robinson at Home

Curtains drawn back, the door ajar.
All winter long, it seemed, a darkening
Began. But now the moonlight and the odors of the street  
Conspire and combine toward one community.

These are the rooms of Robinson.
Bleached, wan, and colorless this light, as though 
All the blurred daybreaks of the spring
Found an asylum here, perhaps for Robinson alone,

Who sleeps. Were there more music sifted through the floors  
And moonlight of a different kind,
He might awake to hear the news at ten,
Which will be shocking, moderately.

This sleep is from exhaustion, but his old desire  
To die like this has known a lessening.
Now there is only this coldness that he has to wear.  
But not in sleep.—Observant scholar, traveller,

Or uncouth bearded figure squatting in a cave, 
A keen-eyed sniper on the barricades,
A heretic in catacombs, a famed roué,
A beggar on the streets, the confidant of Popes—

All these are Robinson in sleep, who mumbles as he turns,  
“There is something in this madhouse that I symbolize—
This city—nightmare—black—”           
                          He wakes in sweat  

To the terrible moonlight and what might be
Silence. It drones like wires far beyond the roofs,  
And the long curtains blow into the room.

Relating to Robinson

Somewhere in Chelsea, early summer;
And, walking in the twilight toward the docks,  
I thought I made out Robinson ahead of me.

From an uncurtained second-story room, a radio  
Was playing There’s a Small Hotel; a kite
Twisted above dark rooftops and slow drifting birds.  
We were alone there, he and I,
Inhabiting the empty street.

Under a sign for Natural Bloom Cigars,
While lights clicked softly in the dusk from red to green,  
He stopped and gazed into a window
Where a plaster Venus, modeling a truss,
Looked out at Eastbound traffic. (But Robinson,
I knew, was out of town: he summers at a place in Maine,
Sometimes on Fire Island, sometimes the Cape,
Leaves town in June and comes back after Labor Day.)
And yet, I almost called out, “Robinson!”

There was no chance. Just as I passed,  
Turning my head to search his face,  
His own head turned with mine
And fixed me with dilated, terrifying eyes  
That stopped my blood. His voice
Came at me like an echo in the dark.

“I thought I saw the whirlpool opening.  
Kicked all night at a bolted door.
You must have followed me from Astor Place.  
An empty paper floats down at the last.
And then a day as huge as yesterday in pairs  
Unrolled its horror on my face
Until it blocked—” Running in sweat  
To reach the docks, I turned back
For a second glance. I had no certainty,  
There in the dark, that it was Robinson  
Or someone else.
                        The block was bare. The Venus,  
Bathed in blue fluorescent light,
Stared toward the river. As I hurried West,  
The lights across the bay were coming on.
The boats moved silently and the low whistles blew.

Alan’s Notes:
With his film noir looks, lean with clipped moustache that went with the 1930s/40s/50s United States, Weldon Kees some said looked like Robert Taylor [with whom he was at school in 1920s Nebraska]. I’m as inclined to opt for Zachary Scott.

The Kees career-range included being a librarian, a short-story writer [and briefly an unpublished novelist] a journalist which included being a book, film and art critic, a scriptwriter, playwright, photographer, film-maker, Jazz pianist, Jazz composer and Abstract Impressionist painter. If some might believe he was some kind of ‘try anything’ neurotic, I’d be more judicious, for beyond these what truly remains of him must be Kees the poet. Indeed the poet near as famous for his disappearance. Since, as all poets die and plenty stop writing, he was the one who vanished, sometime before his car was found abandoned on the Golden Gate Bridge, July 1955.

Throughout the sombre inward visions of his verse there is he knows much activity to well observe and well record. And like let’s say Frank O’Hara you get the idea that being a perfectionist was the least of his worries, which helps plenty of his poems being quite perfect. And I keep thinking how much of his work invokes black-and-white cinema, even in those pieces where colour is mentioned. For he possessed a sardonic humanity which given the Depression, War and Post-War times was doubtless the best form of humanity to have. ‘Won’t your poetry give us some hope?’ it might be asked. To which there might come this reply: ‘I’m writing…trying to engage you…isn’t that enough?’

The protagonist, Robinson, isn’t Kees, though he can certainly identify with the middle-aged single man [a widower? a divorcee?] living alone, if possessing some form of Manhattan social life. White-collared, well-heeled-enough, it might be asked ‘How does Robinson earn his living?’ That though is for the reader, given that Kees is very good at giving across enough material for speculation or even imagination. Prolix he wasn’t, which given my own [at times] large scale ambitions is a solid reason for both my delight and envy.

These four poems weren’t composed so much as a sequence per se. Covering a number of years in the Kees career the order they appear in his post-disappearance Collected Poems is how I figure they are meant to evolve. After ‘Relating to Robinson’, the final poem, I can’t conceive of anymore being written.

And is there some faint, ambiguous air of optimism at the end of ‘Relating to Robinson’? Possibly. For after the uncertain, near nightmare-like encounter that the narrator [Kees?] has with Robinson [and indeed is that person Robinson?] after all this the city is continuing, as indeed life is, and the poet is…until he disappears.