Being forced into the dilemma of a recognition that remains irretrievably ambiguous and unsusceptible to empirical proof or the operations of logic seems initially to throw the individual back on herself, to a place of isolation.

          and here we go
     singing of it, that sacred absence
     that is mostly what I know of God.
     To love and to be sure, in that hollow
     place inside the solid world
     just one word down.

Yet in this poem, Robert Kelly coils and circumambulates around exactly this difficulty: this piece of poem gives us a plural pronoun (e.g., presence multiplied!) followed by an absence that is simultaneously an invocation of the divine. An affirmation of the relationality of love ventures further to a site of hollowness in what appears to be, paradoxically, solid—the word—and that word as the locus of communication displaced, “just one word down.”

The word slipping out of our grasp.