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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Kelly
Robert Kelly
Born in Brooklyn in 1935, Robert Kelly is the author of more than fifty collections of poems, including Red Actions: Selected Poems 1960-1993 and Kill the Messenger Who Brings Bad News, which received the Los Angeles Times First Annual Book Award in 1980...
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Looking  
by Robert Kelly

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.



From Red Actions: Selected Poems 1960-1993. Copyright © 1995 by Robert Kelly. Used by permission of the author.
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