What is it sees through, becomes
reflection, empty signal of the past,
a piece I kept in mind because
I thought it had come true?
I would have known you anywhere,
brother, known we were going to meet
wherever, in the street, this echo
too. I would have known you.
The Terribly Strange Bed
I recall there being
portraits on the wall
with stiff, painted eyes
rolled round in the dark
on the wall across
from my bed and the other
in the room upstairs
where we all slept
as those eyes kept looking
the persons behind
about to kill me
only in sleep safe.
Stairway to Heaven
Point of hill
we’d come to, small
rise there, the friends
now separate, cars
back of us by
lane, the stones,
Bowditch, etc., location,
Tulip Path, hard
to find on the
shaft, that insistent
rise to heaven
goes down and down,
with names like floors,
ledges of these echoes,
Charlotte, Sarah,
Thomas, Annie
and all, as with
wave of hand I’d
wanted them one
way or other to
come, go with them.
Interior
The room next to
this one with the lowered
lights, the kids watching
television, dogs squatted
on floor, and couch’s
disarray, and all that
comes of living anywhere
before the next house, town,
people get to know you if
you let them, nowhere safe.
Common
Common’s profound bottom
of flotsam, specious increase
of the space, a ground abounds,
a place to make it.
Not Much
Not much you ever
said you were thinking
of, not much to
say in answer.
Epic
Wanting to tell
a story,
like hell’s simple invention, or
some neat recovery
of the state of grace,
I can recall lace curtains,
people I think I remember,
Mrs. Curley’s face.
The World
The world so sweet its
saccharine outshot by
simple cold so colors
all against the so-called
starkness of the winter’s
white and grey the
clouds the ice the
weather stables all in
flat particular light
each sunlit place so placed.
After Pasternak
Think that it’s all one?
Snow’s thud, the car’s
stuck door, the brilliant,
patient sun—
How many millions of years
has it been coming
to be here just this once—
never returning—
Oh dull edge of prospect—
weary window on the past—
whatever is here now
cannot last.
Tree
FOR WARREN
You tree
of company—
here
shadowed branches,
small,
twisted comfortably
your size,
reddish buds’ clusters—
all of
you I love
here
by the simple river.
Broad Bay
Water’s a shimmer,
banks green verge,
trees’ standing shadowed,
sun’s light slants,
gulls settle white
on far river’s length.
All is in a windy echo,
time again
a far sense.
Just in Time
FOR ANNE
Over the unwritten
and under the written
and under and over
and in back and in front of
or up or down or in
or in place of, of not,
of this and this, of
all that is, of it.
Nationalgalerie Berlin
Nationalgalerie’s
minute spasm’s
self-reflective—
art’s meager agony?
Two hundred years
zap past
in moment’s
echoing blast!
No one apparently left
to say “hello”—
but for the genial
late Romanticists.
God, what a life!
All you see is pain.
I can’t go through that again
—gotta go!
.
Trying to get image of man
like trying on suit,
too small, too loose,
too late, too soon—
Wrong fit. Wrong time.
And you look out of
your tired head,
still stark naked,
and you go to bed.
.
“Bellevue-Tower”
could be Brooklyn,
The roller skaters
go round and around on the plaza,
like “In Brueghel’s great picture, The Kermess . . .”
Their rhythmic beauty
is so human, so human.
I watch and watch.
.
Kids now with skateboards.
Edge of their chatter,
boys, voices changing,
lower, grow harsher.
This is the life of man,
the plans, the ways
you have to do it.
“Practice makes perfect.”
.
BY THE CANAL / SITTING
The rippled, shelved
surface of water,
quiet canal, the chunky
horse chestnut trees spread over
reflected in edge of darker
surface where else the light
shows in endless small rows
of slight, securing peace and quiet.
Further off, on each side,
cars, buses, trucks, bikes, and people.
But man and boy
pass back of me, spin of wheels,
murmur of their voices.
Life
FOR BASIL
Specific, intensive clarity,
like nothing else
is anything
but itself—
so echoes all,
seen, felt, heard
or tasted, the one
and many. But
my slammed fist
on door, asking
meager, repentant entry
wants more.
Dialing for Dollars
CHOO CHOO
My mother just on edge
of unexpected death the
fact of one operation over
successful says, it’s all
free, Bob! You don’t
have to pay for any of it!
Life, like. Waiting for the train.
.
LIKE MINE
I’ll always love
you no matter you
get all that money
and don’t need a
helping hand like mine.
.
WAITING
I’ve never had the
habit of money but
have at times wanted
it, enough to give
myself and friend
s an
easy time over the
hump but you can
probably keep it, I’m
just here breathing, brother,
not exactly beside you.
.
THE WILLYS
Little
dollar
bills.
Picture
The scale’s wrong. Kid’s
leaned up against
Dad’s huge leg, a
tree trunk, unfeeling bark,
rushing waters
of piss? Must be it
smells like toast,
like granular egg
or all night coffee
on all alone. All
so small,
so far to go.
Leaving
Where to go
if into blank wall
and back of you
you can’t get to—
So night is black
and day light,
ground, water
elemental.
It all accumulates
a place, something real
in place.
There it is—
till it’s time to go,
like they say,
but the others
want to stay, and will.
Nature Morte
It’s still
life. It
just ain’t moving.
Fleurs
Clumped Clares.
Asphobellies.
Blumenschein.
The Company
FOR THE SIGNET SOCIETY, APRIL 11, 1985
Backward—as if retentive.
“The child is father to the man”
or some such echo of device,
a parallel of use and circumstance.
Scale become implication.
Place, postcard determinant—
only because someone sent it.
Relations—best if convenient.
“Out of all this emptiness
something must come . . .” Concomitant
with the insistent banality, small, still
face in mirror looks simply vacant.
Hence blather, disjunct, incessant
indecision, moving along on
road to next town where what waited
was great expectations again, empty plate.
So there they were, expectably ambivalent,
given the Second World War
“to one who has been long in city pent,”
trying to make sense of it.
We—morituri—blasted from classic
humanistic noblesse oblige, all the garbage
of either so-called side, hung on
to what we thought we had, an existential
raison d’être like a pea
some faded princess tries to sleep on,
and when that was expectably soon gone,
we left. We walked away.
Recorders ages hence will look for us
not only in books, one hopes, nor only under rocks
but in some common places of feeling,
small enough—but isn’t the human
just that echoing, resonant edge
of what it knows it knows,
takes heart in remembering
only the good times, yet
can’t forget whatever it was,
comes here again, fearing this
is the last day, this is the last,
the last, the last.
Two
WINDOW
Scales
FOR BUDDY
Such small dimension
finally, the comfortable
end of it, the people
fading, world shrunk
to some recollected
edge of where it used to be,
and all around a sound
of coming, going, rustle
of neighboring movement out there
where as ever what one finally
sees, hears, wants, waits
still to recognize—is it
the sun? Grass, ground,
dog’s bark, bird, the
opening, high clouds, fresh,
lifting day—someone?
Xmas
I’m sure there’s a world I
can get to by walking another
block in the direction that
was pointed out to me by any-
one I was with and would even
talk to me that late at
night and with everything
confused—I know—the
kids tired, nerves stretched—
and all, and this person, old
man, Santa Claus! by
god—the reindeer, the presents.
Window
THEN
The window had
been half
opened and the
door also
opened, and the
world then
invited, waited,
and one
entered
.
X
The world is
many, the
mind is
one.
.
WHERE
The window
opened,
beyond edge
of white hall,
light faint
shifts from back
a picture?
slurlike “wing”?
Who’s
home?
.
The roof’s
above, old
reddish dulled
tiles, small
dormered windows, two
chimneys, above
the greyish,
close sky.
.
Who’s there,
old
question, who’s
here.
.
LIGHT
Light’s on
now
in three
sided balcony
window mid-
building, a floor
up from street.
Wait.
Watch it.
What light
on drab earth,
place on earth—
Continue?
Where to go so
far away
from here?
Friends?
Forgotten?
Movement?
A hand just
flesh, fingers?
White—
Who threads fantastic tapestry
just for me, for me?
.
WAITING
One could sit
minutes, hours,
days, weeks,
months, years—
all of its
rehearsal one
after one, be done
at last with it?
.
Or could go
in
to it, be
inside
head, look
at day
turn to dark,
get rid
of it at last, think
out
of patience, give
it up?
.
Man
with paper, white,
in hand
“tells the truth”
silent, moves
past the window
away—
sits down?
Comes back,
leans
forward at waist,
somewhat stiffly—
not
old,
young, young.
.
He must love someone
and this must be the story
of how he wanted
everything rightly done
but without the provision
planned, fell forward
into it all,
could not withstand
the adamant simplicity
of life’s “lifelike” r
eality—
even in a mirror
replaced by another—
and couldn’t wait
any longer,
must have
moved here.
To “live a life” alone?
to “come home”?
To be “lost and found”
again, “never more to roam”
again. Or something more like
“the fading light,” like
they say, never quite
come. Never just one.
Place
Your face
in mind, slow love,
slow growing, slow
to learn enough.
Patience to learn
to be here, to savor
whatever there is
out there, without you
here, here
by myself.
New World
Edenic land, Adamic person—
Foolishness is the price you’ll have to pay
for such useless wisdom.
Ho Ho
FOR JOEL
I have broken
the small bounds
of this existence and
am travelling south
on route 90. It
is approximately
midnight, surrogate
earth time, and you
who could, can, and
will never take anything
seriously will die
as dumb as ever
while I alone in
state celestial shoot
forward at designed rate,
speed at last unimpeded.
Three
SEVEN
Seven: A Suite for Robert Therrien
STRAIGHT
They were going up in
a straight line right
to God, once they died—
The hills of home here
are a yellow pointer, again
God’s simplistic finger—
Over the hill, the steeple
still glows in the late light—
all else whited out.
.
PLATE
All I ever wanted was
a place
up there
by myself.
.
“and the sky above—an old
blue
place” an
old
blue plate an old
blue face
.
Very carefully I
cut out an absolute
circle of blue
sky
or water. They
couldn’t tell
the difference.
.
Blue plate
special
The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley Page 14