things, of what’s happened, of what a life is
and was, my life, when I wonder what it meant,
the sad days passing, the continuing, echoing deaths,
all the painful, belligerent news, and the dog still
waiting to be fed, the closeness of you sleeping, voices,
presences, of children, of our own grown children,
the shining, bright sun, the smell of the air just now,
each physical moment, passing, passing, it’s what
it always is or ever was, just then, just there.
“To think . . .”
To think oneself again
into a tiny hole of self
and pull the covers round
and close the mouth—
shut down the eyes and hands,
keep still the feet,
and think of nothing if one can
not think of it—
a space in whose embrace
such substance is,
a place of emptiness
the heart’s regret.
World’s mind is after all
an afterthought
of what was there before
and is there still.
Old Song
I’m feeling ok still in some small way.
I’ve come too far to just go away.
I wish I could stay here some way.
So that what now comes wouldn’t only be more
of what’s to be lost. What’s left would still leave more
to come if one didn’t rush to get there.
What’s still to say? Your eyes, your hair, your smile,
your body sweet as fresh air, your voice in the clear morning
after another night, another night, we lay together, sleeping?
If that has to go, it was never here.
If I know still you’re here, then I’m here too
and love you, and love you.
For Ric, who Loved this World
The sounds
of his particular
music keep echoing,
stay in the soft
air months after
all’s gone to
grass, to lengthening
shadows, to slanting
sun on shifting water,
to the late light’s edges
through tall trees—
despite the mind’s
still useless,
ponderous thought.
Oh, do you remember . . .
Remember sweet Ed
who despite being dead
embedded
all he said
with lead
could make you dead
too if that’s it
for you,
oh dummy
of text,
be it western or mex?
He had grace like a swallow’s,
nothing unfallow,
“Elizabethan” at root
with sideburns to boot,
quick on trigger,
also with jigger,
kept an apt time,
walked with a rhyme.
I loved his style
and his guile,
no friend to the loser,
vapid day cruiser,
elsewise bamboozler.
My Ed was quondam god
from human sod
who spoke not loud
but always clear and proud,
often with acid edge—
his pledge
to keep the faith
stays constant to this day.
Paul
I’ll never forgive myself for the
violence propelled me at sad Paul
Blackburn, pushed in turn by both
our hopeless wives who were spitting
venom at one another in the heaven
we’d got ourselves to, Mallorca, mid-fifties,
where one could live for peanuts while
writing great works and looking at the
constant blue sea, etc. Why did I fight such
surrogate battles of existence with such
a specific friend as he was for sure?
Our first meeting NYC 1950 we talked two
and a half days straight without leaving the
apartment. He knew Auden and Yeats
by heart and had begun on Pound’s lead
translating the Provençal poets, and was
studying with Moses Hadas at NYU. How
sweet this thoughtful beleaguered vulnerable
person whose childhood was full of New
England abusive confusion, his mother the too
often absent poet, Frances Frost! I wish
he were here now, we could go on talking,
I’d have company of my own age in this
drab burned out trashed dump we call the
phenomenal world where he once walked
the wondrous earth and knew its pleasures.
Mediterranean I
This same inexhaustible sea with impenetrable
Same blue look I stepped into when so young I
Had no reason for a life more than to hold on to
The one I had, wife, daughter, and two sons, older,
If seven and five, just, can be measure of more than
A vulnerable innocence. The back wheel of bike,
When brake failed, caught elder son’s heel and used
It to stop, stripping the skin off almost to the bone.
I packed the place with ointment and bandaged it, not
Wanting to see how bad it might be, and for days son
Went on hop and hand holds spider fashion until,
Blessedly, it was well again. Oh life, oh miracle of
Day to day existence, sun, food and others! Would
Those who lived with me then believe how much
I loved them? Know how dumbly, persistently, I cared?
Mediterranean II
The cranky low decked freighter with orange stickup
stern cabin we could see from the open window of
this place each day out there on proverbial ocean has
moved away, shifting the focus of that blue to an
implacable distance now going out to a shaded, faded
edge of sky beyond all recalled dreams or places. One
so wanted it to be the old time story of them waiting till
dark at last came and then, with muffled oars, they’d row
into the hidden cove, climb up the adjoining cliff, and
into my waiting heart. How many times so long ago I’d
see the fisherman at nightfall row out into the darkened
sea with their long awkward boats, oars in unison, to what
determined fate, and if there were a world at edge of this
one, there at last they might pull ashore. Now the sea’s slurring,
recurring sound, its battering, white capped, upon the
rocks, forces both free and unknown to me, have no work
but this tedious recurrence, dreams repeated, insistent, useless.
War
Blur of world is red smear on white page,
metaphors useless, thoughts impotent,
even the sense of days is lost
in the raging militance.
No life other than political,
the fact of family and friends
subjorned to the general
conduct of this bitter abstract.
I look in the mirror
to see old man looking back,
eyes creased, squinting,
finds nothing left.
He longs for significance,
a scratch in the dust, an odor
of some faint fruit, some flower
whose name he’d lost.
Why would they hate him
who fight now insistently
to kill one another
—why not.
Talking
I was trying to think
of when rightly
to enter the conversation with all
the others talking thoughtfully,
comfortably. There was no occasion
to say that thirty years in the army was
a long time or that very probably the
world is flatter than one thinks. A star
is as far as one’s eye can see? My shirt
had broken buttons I had hid with
my tie. Otherwise I was clean and
reasonably dressed. Yet, impatient to
join in, I could hear my voice landing
suddenly on the edge of another’s
comment, me saying I can’t now remember
what, just their saying, “What? What?”
Bye and Bye
Faded in face of apparent reality—
As it comes, I see it still goes on and on,
and even now still sitting at this table
is the smiling man who nobody seems to know.
Older, the walls apparently get higher.
No one seemingly gets to look over
to see the people pointing at the sky
where the old planes used to fly over.
I packed my own reality in a bag
and pushed it under the table,
thinking to retrieve it when able
some time bye and bye.
For John Wieners
Glass roses or something else hardly expected—an
Abundance of good will, a kind hand in usual troubles.
Do you hear voices all around you, a sort of whispering,
Echoing silence as if someone had left a window open?
Reading those several times with John, we were first
In a great hall, the Y uptown, where he said he’d heard Auden
Read, and now we did—the great velvet curtains, the useful
Sense of a company in the same place where we now stood, echoing.
Then at Bard, first time I’d met Tom Meyer still a student, and
We, John, Bobbie and me, had driven up from New York together,
In bleak aftermath of Olson’s telling John he was going off with Panna,
On the phone in the Chelsea, the blasted heath we were leaving behind.
Sweet, you might say, impeccable gentleman, like Claude Rains, his
Boston accent held each word a particular obligation and value.
I see his face as still a young man, in San Francisco, hearing him
Talking with Joanne, hearing him talk with Joe Dunn, with friends.
When you are a poet as he was, you have no confusions, you write
The words you are given to, you are possessed or protected by a vision.
We are not going anywhere, we are somewhere, here where John is,
Where he’s brought us much as he might himself this evening, to listen.
I think of all the impossible loves of my life, all the edges of feeling,
All the helpless reach to others one tried so bitterly to effect, to reach
As one might a hilltop, an edge of sea where the waves can break at last
On the shore. I think of just jumping into darkness, into deep water,
Into nothing one can ever point to as a place out there, just its shadow, a
Beckoning echo of something, a premonition, which does not warn but ‹invites.
There is music in pain but not because of it, love in each persistent ‹breath.
His was the Light of the World, a lit match or the whole city, burning.
After School
We’d set off into the woods
and would climb trees there
and throw things, shouting
at one another, great shrieking
cries I remember—or would, if
I dreamt—in dreams. In dreams,
the poet wrote, begin responsibilities.
I thought that was like going to
some wondrous place and all was
waiting there just for you to come
and do what had to be done.
Help!
Help’s easy enough
If it comes in time.
Nothing’s that hard
If you want to rhyme.
It’s when they shoot you
It can hurt,
When the bombs blast off
And you’re gone with a squirt.
Sitting in a bunker,
Feeling blue?
Don’t be a loser,
It wasn’t you—
Wasn’t you wanted
To go kill people,
Wasn’t you caused
All this trouble.
I can’t say, Run!
And I can’t say, Hide!
But I still feel
What I feel inside.
It’s wrong to kill people
Just to make them pay.
Wrong to blast cities
To make them go away.
You can’t take everything
Away from fathers,
Mothers, babies,
Sisters and brothers.
You live in a house?
Wipe your feet!
Take a look around—
Ain’t it neat
To come home at night
And have a home,
Be able to sit down
Even all alone?
You think that anyone
Ought to get pushed,
Shoved around
for some old Bush?
Use your head,
Don’t get scared,
Stand up straight,
Show what you’re made of.
America’s heaven,
Let’s keep it that way
Which means not killing,
Not running scared,
Not being a creep,
Not wanting to get “them.”
Take a chance
And see what they want then.
Maybe just to be safe,
Maybe just to go home,
Maybe just to live
Not scared to the bone,
Not dumped on by world
They won’t let you into,
Not forgotten by all
The ones who did it to you.
Sing together!
Make sure it’s loud!
One’s always one,
But the world’s a crowd
Of people, people,
All familiar.
Take a look!
At least it won’t kill you.
Shimmer
FOR GRAHAM DEAN
. . . We will all survive, addressed to such glimmering
shimmering transience with its insistent
invitation of other.
So close, so warm, so full.
I
At the edge of the evening then, at
the edge of the river, this edge
of being, as one says, one’s own
given body, inexorable me, whatever then
can enter, what other stays there, initial,
wave of that changing weather, wind
lifting off sea, cloud fading northward,
even one’s own hands’ testament, clenched
seeming fists—pinch me, pinch
ME . . . The person inside the mirror
was hiding, came forward only
as you did, was too far inside you, too
much yourself doubling, twinned,
spun in image as you were, a patient
reality to provoke simple witness,
precluded, occluded, still cloudy.
I am going now
and you can’t come with me . . .
There is no one here but you.
But who are you, who is it
one takes as life, as so-called reality,
like the mirror’s shimmering light
as the sun strikes it, cobwebbed with dust,
layered with its own substance?
Oneself is instance, an echo
mirrored, double
d. Oneself is twin.
II
Looking in, you saw
a faint head there
at some end of what seemed
a mass of things, a layered
density of reflection, which was substance,
someone. Someone looking back.
But no one looked out.
All echo? Semblance?
No self to come home to,
no one to say, be yourself— to say, it’s you?
There is no looking back
or way of being separate.
One can only stand there, here, apart
and see another I still, wherever, inside oneself.
Sad Walk
I’ve come to the old echoes again,
know it’s where I’ve been before,
see the same old sun.
But backwards, from all the yesterdays,
it’s still the same way,
who gets and who pays.
I was younger then,
walking along still open,
young and having fun.
But now it’s just a sad walk
to an empty park,
to sit down and wait, wait to get out.
Caves
So much of my childhood seems
to have been spent in rooms—
at least in memory, the shades
pulled down to make it darker, the
shaft of sunlight at the window’s edge.
I could hear the bees then gathering
outside in the lilacs, the birds chirping
as the sun, still high, began to drop.
It was summer, in heaven of small town,
hayfields adjacent, creak and croak
of timbers, of house, of trees, dogs,
elders talking, the lone car turning some
distant corner on Elm Street
way off across the broad lawn.
We dug caves or else found them,
down the field in the woods. We had
shacks we built after battering
at trees, to get branches, made tepee-
like enclosures, leafy, dense and in-
substantial. Memory is the cave
one finally lives in, crawls on
hands and knees to get into.
If Mother says, don’t draw
on the book pages, don’t color
that small person in the picture, then
you don’t unless compulsion, distraction
dictate and you’re floating off
on wings of fancy, of persistent seeing
of what’s been seen here too, right here,
The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley Page 30