But tomorrow I’m going to take Durer to lunch again.
He won’t sit still. He’ll be interested in the supermarket
down the block and traffic, well traffic–it took about
an hour for him to try out all the adjustments on
the seat belt. He doesn’t like cars much, though.
The surfaces are too flat and shiny. He misses animals.
I take him to the Farmer’s Market, where the Amish
hang calendar pictures of fine horses and speak to him
in old Deutsch. He sketches a black woman at the counter.
He measures my palm against the length of my face.
He is agitated by fluorescent lighting. We stand outside
in the cold and count starlings. I give him a little rice
to throw. He decides to wait for spring before we go
out again. I understand. He’s pretty heavy to carry.
Too many pages and colorplates and indices. I didn’t
really mean to get him so wet.
Kelley’s writing has been widely published since 2000 in journals including Exquisite Corpse, Friends Journal, Nimrod, Poet Lore, Rattle, the Journal of the American Medical Association and in a number of chapbooks and full-length collections, most recently Toxic Environment from Boston Poet Press, Two Birds in Flame, poems related to the Shaker Community at Canterbury, NH, from Beech River Books, and “In Memory of the Body Donors,” Covert Press. She have received several honors, including a 2008 grant for poetry from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
