FOR CAROLYN KIZER
Let the dog lie down with the dog,
people with people.
It makes a difference where you fit
and how you feel.
When young, I was everybody’s human,
a usual freaked person,
looking for love in the dark,
being afraid to turn the lights on.
It makes a great difference
to have a friend
who’s a woman,
when you’re a so-called man,
who can talk to you
across the great divide
of mixed signals
and wounded pride.
Small thanks in the end
for that maintaining sister,
but what she says
is what you remember.
For Georg
Art says,
what are you looking at?
But the words want
to say what they have to.
If there is here
then there’s here too?
The grey green monster with
the ugly face isn’t here,
the words want to say. But, look,
says the image, right behind you!
Anthropomorphic instance in any case
is a drag. You don’t get reality as choices.
The battle goes on,
pens into ploughshares, canvas into awnings—
or simply faces
in the crowd. I want
a lot of things, the
separables, the x’s and y’s
of existence. Upside down,
says Georg, is a whole new ballgame!
The runner
advances to second.
For Gregory Corso
I’ll miss you,
who did better than I did
at keeping the faith of poets,
staying true.
It’s as if you couldn’t
do otherwise,
had always an appetite
waiting to lead.
You kept to the high road
of canny vision,
let the rest of us
find our own provision.
Ruthless, friends felt,
you might take everything.
Nothing was safe from you.
You did what you wanted.
Yet, safe in your words, your poems,
their humor could hold me.
The wit, the articulate
gathering rhythms,
all made a common sense
of the archaic wonders.
You pulled from nowhere the kingly chair.
You sat alone there.
The Heart
FOR PEN
In the construction
of the chest, there is
a heart.
A boat
upon its blood
floats past
and round or down
the stream of life,
the plummeting veins
permit its passage
to admit no gains,
no looking back.
One steps aboard,
one’s off.
The ticket taker
signs the time allotted.
Seated, amorphous persons
see no scenery
but feel
a chill about their knees
and hear a fading cry
as all the many sides of life
whiz by,
a blast at best, a loss
of individual impressions.
Still I sit
with you inside me too—
and us,
the couple thus encoupled,
ride on into the sweetening dark.
Memory
FOR KEITH AND ROSMARIE
Remember when
we all were ten
and had again
what’s always been—
Or if we were,
no fear was there
to cause some stir
or be elsewhere—
Because it’s when
all thoughts occur
to say again
we’re where we were.
“If I were writing this . . .”
If I were writing this
with prospect of encouragement
or had I begun some work
intended to be what it was
or even then and there it was what
had been started, even now
I no longer thought to wait,
had begun, had found
myself in the time and place
writing words which I knew,
could say ring, dog, hat, car,
was rushing, it felt, to keep up
with the trembling impulse,
the connivance the words contrived
even themselves to be though
I wrote them, thought they were me.
.
Once in, once out
Turn’s a roundabout
Seeing eyes get the nod
Or dog’s a mistaken god?
God’s a mistaken dog?
Gets you home on time
Rhymes with time on time
In time for two a “t”
begins and ends it.
.
A blue grey edge.
Trees line it.
Green field finds it.
Eyes look.
.
Let the aching heart take over.
Cry till eyes blur.
Be as big as you were.
Stir the pot.
.
Whenever it’s sense,
look for what else is meant
in the underthought of language.
Words are apparent.
Seen light turns off
to be ambient luminescence,
there and sufficient.
No electricians.
Same sight,
shadows at edge of light,
green field again
where hedgerow finds it.
Read these words then
and see the far trees,
hear the chittering of the birds,
share my ease and dependence.
For Kenneth
It was never a joke.
Hell’s not its own reward.
If one even thought of it,
then there it was.
But your classic humor
of the edge, of being about to—
and hanging on even for one last look—
that was truly heroic.
I thought “Sleeping with Women”
sounded like birds settling
in some idyllic edge of meadow
just at night fall.
So there I held on—put my head
down on the pillow,
slept with your words recurring,
fast in their thought.
Hiccups
FOR PHIL
It all goes round,
nothing lost, nothing found—
a common ground.
Outside is in,
that’s where it all begins
and where it seems to end.
An ample circle
with center full
of all that’s in this world—
or that one—
or still another someone
else had thought was fun.
An echo, a genial emptiness,
a finally common place, a bliss
of this and this and this.
Yesterdays
Sixty-two, sixty-three, I most remember
As time W. C. Williams dies and we are
Back from a hard two years in Guatemala
Where the meager provision of being
Schoolmaster for the kids of the patrones
Of two coffee plantations has managed
Neither a life nor money. Leslie dies in
Horror of bank giving way as she and her
Si
ster and their friends tunnel in to make
A cubby. We live in an old cement brick
Farmhouse already inside the city limits
Of Albuquerque. Or that has all really
Happened and we go to Vancouver where,
Thanks to friends Warren and Ellen Tallman,
I get a job teaching at the University of British
Columbia. It’s all a curious dream, a rush
To get out of the country before the sad
Invasion of the Bay of Pigs, that bleak use
Of power. One of my British colleagues
Has converted the assets of himself and
His wife to gold bullion and keeps the
Ingots in a sturdy suitcase pushed under
Their bed. I love the young, at least I
Think I do, in their freshness, their attempt
To find ways into Canada from the western
Reaches. Otherwise the local country seems
Like a faded Edwardian sitcom. A stunned
Stoned woman runs one Saturday night up
And down the floors of the Hydro Electric
Building on Pender with the RCMP in hot
Pursuit where otherwise we stood in long
Patient lines, extending often several blocks
Up the street. We were waiting to get our
Hands stamped and to be given a 12 pack
Of Molson’s. I think, I dream, I write the
Final few chapters of The Island, the despairs
Gathering at the end. I read Richard Brautigan’s
Trout Fishing in America but am too uptight
To enjoy his quiet, bright wit. Then that
Summer there is the great Vancouver Poetry
Festival, Allen comes back from India, Olson
From Gloucester, beloved Robert Duncan
From Stinson Beach. Denise reads “Hypocrite
Women” to the Burnaby ladies and Gary Snyder,
Philip Whalen, and Margaret Avison are there
Too along with a veritable host of the young.
Then it’s autumn again. I’ve quit my job
And we head back to Albuquerque
And I teach again at the university, and
Sometime just about then I must have
Seen myself as others see or saw me,
Even like in a mirror, but could not quite
Accept either their reassuring friendship
Or their equally locating anger. Selfish,
Empty, I kept at it. Thirty-eight years later
I seem to myself still much the same,
Even if I am happier, I think, and older.
Ground Zero
What’s after or before
seems a dull locus now
as if there ever could be more
or less of what there is,
a life lived just because
it is a life if nothing more.
The street goes by the door
just like it did before.
Years after I am dead,
there will be someone here instead
perhaps to open it,
look out to see what’s there—
even if nothing is,
or ever was,
or somehow all got lost.
Persist, go on, believe.
Dreams may be all we have,
whatever one believe
of worlds wherever they are—
with people waiting there
will know us when we come
when all the strife is over,
all the sad battles lost or won,
all turned to dust.
John’s Song
FOR JOHN TAGGART
If ever there is
if ever, if ever
there is, if ever there is.
If ever there is
other than war, other
than where war was, if ever there is.
If ever there is
no war, no more war, no other than us
where war was, where it was.
No more war, dear brother,
no more, no more war
if ever there is.
Emptiness
FOR HELEN
The emptiness up the field where
the barn sits still like an ark, an old
presence I look up there to see, sun
setting, sky gone a vivid streaking of
reds and oranges, a sunset off over the
skirt of woods where my sister’s barn sits
up the field with all her determined stuff,
all she brought and put in it, all her
pictures, her pots, her particular books
and icons—so empty, it seems, quickly
emptied of everything there was in it, like
herself the last time in the hospital bed had
been put to face out the big window back of
tv, so one could look out, see down there,
over the field, trees of our place, the house,
woods beyond going off toward Warren, the sight,
she’d say with such emphasis, I’m where I
want to be!—could ever Maine be more loved,
more wanted, all our history trailing back
through its desperation, our small people, small
provision, where the poor folk come from like
us, to Massachusetts, to a world where poverty
was a class, like Mrs. Peavey told our mother
she’d never felt poor before, not till she was
given charity by the women of the Women’s
Club, her family their annual recipient—empty,
empty, running on empty, on nothing, on heart,
on bits and pieces of elegance, on an exquisite frame
of words, on each and every memory she ever had,
on the same will as our mother’s, the pinched privacy
of empty purse, the large show of pleasure, of out there
everything, come in, come in— she lay there so still,
she had gone into herself, face gone then but for echo
of way she had looked, no longer saw or heard, no more
of any human want, no one wanted. Go away,
she might have been saying, I’m busy today. Go away.
Hence then to be cremated, to reach the end and be done.
Memory
Somewhere Allen Ginsberg is
recalling his mother’s dream
about God, an old man, she says,
living across the river in
Palisades, obscure, battered,
in a shack with hardly any
provisions. Straight off she asks him,
how could you let the world get
into such a mess, and he can
answer only, I did the best I could.
She tells Allen he looks neglected
and there are yellow pee-stains
on his underpants. Hard to hear
God could not do any better
than any of us, just another old
man sitting on some bench or some
chair. I remember it was a urologist
told me how to strip the remaining pee
from my penis by using my finger’s
pressure just back of the balls,
the prostate, then bringing it forward
so that the last drops of it would go
into the toilet, not onto my clothes.
Still it’s of necessity an imperfect
solution. How stand at a public urinal
seeming to play with oneself? Yet
how not—if that’s what it takes not
to walk out, awkward, wide-legged, damp
from the crotch down? I cannot
believe age can be easy for anyone. On
Golden Pond may be a pleasant picture
of a lake and that general area of
New Hampshire, but it’s not true,
any of it. Please, don’t pu
t, if
you can help it, your loved ones in
a care facility, they will only die there.
Everyone’s sick there. It’s why they’ve come.
I don’t know now what will or
may happen to me. I don’t
feel any longer a simple person with
a name. I am like a kid at his,
or her, first day of school. All new,
all surprising. The teacher with
her curious large face, the other
unexpected children, all of us finally
unsure. The seeming fractures of a self
grow ominous, like peaks of old
mountains remembered but faint
in the obscuring fog. Time to push off, do
some push-ups perhaps, take a walk with
the neighbors I haven’t spoken to in years.
Generous Life
Do you remember the way we used to sing
in church when we were young
and it was fun to bring your toys with you
and play with them while all the others sung?
My mind goes on its own particular way
and leaves my apparent body on its knees
to get up and walk as far as it can
if it still wants to and as it still proves able.
Sit down, says generous life, and stay awhile!
although it’s irony that sets the table
and puts the meager food on broken dishes,
pours out the rancid wine and walks away.
On Earth
When I think
When I think of where I’ve come from
or even try to measure as any kind of
distance those places, all the various
people, and all the ways in which I
remember them, so that even the skin I
touched or was myself fact of, inside,
could see through like a hole in the wall
or listen to, it must have been, to what
was going on in there, even if I was still
too dumb to know anything—When I think
of the miles and miles of roads, of meals,
of telephone wires even, or even of water
poured out in endless streams down streaks
of black sky or the dirt roads washed clean,
or myriad, salty tears and suddenly it’s spring
again, or it was—Even when I think again of
all those I treated so poorly, names, places,
their waiting uselessly for me in the rain and
I never came, was never really there at all,
was moving so confusedly, so fast, so driven
like a car along some empty highway passing,
passing other cars—When I try to think of
The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley Page 29