Collected Poems

by Robert Bly

  I hear voices praising Tshombe, and the Portuguese

  In Angola, these are the men who skinned Little Crow!

  We are all their sons, skulking

  In back rooms, selling nails with trembling hands!

  We distrust every person on earth with black hair;

  We send teams to overthrow Chief Joseph’s government;

  We train natives to kill Presidents with blowdarts;

  We have men loosening the nails on Noah’s Ark.

  The State Department floats in the heavy jellies near the bottom

  Like exhausted crustaceans, like squids who are confused,

  Sending out beams of black light to the open sea,

  Fighting their fraternal feeling for the great landlords.

  We have violet rays that light up the jungles at night, showing

  The friendly populations; we are teaching the children of ritual

  To overcome their longing for life, and we send

  Sparks of black light that fit the holes in the generals’ eyes.

  Underneath all the cement of the Pentagon

  There is a drop of Indian blood preserved in snow:

  Preserved from the trail of blood that once led away

  From the stockade, over the snow, the trail now lost.

  DRIVING THROUGH MINNESOTA DURING THE HANOI BOMBINGS

  We drive between lakes just turning green;

  Late June. The white turkeys have been moved

  To new grass.

  How long the seconds are in great pain!

  Terror just before death,

  Shoulders torn, shot

  From helicopters, the boy

  Tortured with the telephone generator,

  “I felt sorry for him,

  And blew his head off with a shotgun.”

  These instants become crystals,

  Particles

  The grass cannot dissolve. Our own gaiety

  Will end up

  In Asia, and in your cup you will look down

  And see

  Black Starfighters.

  We were the ones we intended to bomb!

  Therefore we will have

  To go far away

  To atone

  For the sufferings of the stringy-chested

  And the small rice-fed ones, quivering

  In the helicopter like wild animals,

  Shot in the chest, taken back to be questioned.

  IV

  IN PRAISE OF GRIEF

  O dear children, look in what a dungeon we are lying, in what lodging we are, for we have been captured by the spirit of the outward world; it is our life, for it nourishes and brings us up, it rules in our marrow and bones, in our flesh and blood, it has made our flesh earthly, and now death has us.

  —Jacob Boehme

  MELANCHOLIA

  1

  A light seen suddenly in the storm, snow

  Coming from all sides, like flakes

  Of sleep, and myself

  On the road to the dark barn,

  Halfway there, a black dog near me.

  2

  Light on the wooden rail.

  Someone I knew and loved.

  As we hear the dates of his marriage

  And the years he moved,

  A wreath of dark fir and shiny laurel

  Slips off the coffin.

  3

  A cathedral: I see

  Starving men, weakened, leaning

  On their knees. But the bells ring anyway,

  Sending out over the planted fields

  A vegetation, sound waves with long leaves.

  4

  There is a wound on the trunk,

  Where the branch was torn off.

  A wind comes out of it,

  Rising, swelling,

  Swirling over everything alive.

  TURNING AWAY FROM LIES

  1

  If we are truly free, and live in a free country,

  When shall I be without this heaviness of mind?

  When shall I have peace? Peace this way and peace that way?

  I have already looked beneath the street

  And there I saw the bitter waters going down,

  The ancient worms eating up the sky.

  2

  Christ did not come to redeem our sins

  The Christ Child was not obedient to his parents

  The Kingdom of Heaven does not mean the next life

  No one in business can be a Christian

  The two worlds are both in this world

  3

  The saints rejoice out loud upon their beds!

  Their song moves through the troubled sea

  The way the holy tortoise moves

  From dark blue into troubled green,

  Or ghost crabs move above the dolomite.

  The thieves are crying in the wild asparagus.

  A HOME IN DARK GRASS

  In the deep fall the body awakes

  And we find lions on the seashore—

  Nothing to fear.

  The wind rises; the water is born,

  Spreading white tomb-clothes on a rocky shore,

  Drawing us up

  From the bed of the land.

  We did not come to remain whole.

  We came to lose our leaves like the trees,

  The trees that are broken

  And start again, drawing up from the great roots;

  So men captured by the Moors

  Wake rowing in the cold ocean

  Air, living a second life.

  That we should learn of poverty and rags,

  That we should taste the weed of Dillinger,

  And swim in the sea,

  Not always walking on dry land,

  And, dancing, find in the trees a savior,

  A home in dark grass,

  And nourishment in death.

  LOOKING AT NEW-FALLEN SNOW FROM A TRAIN

  Snow has covered the next line of tracks,

  And filled the empty cupboards in the milkweed pods;

  It has stretched out on the branches of weeds,

  And softened the frost-hills, and the barbed-wire rolls

  Left leaning against a fencepost—

  It has drifted onto the window ledges high in the peaks of barns.

  A man throws back his head, gasps

  And dies. His ankles twitch, his hands open and close,

  And the fragment of time that he has eaten is exhaled from his pale mouth to nourish the snow.

  A salesman falls, striking his head on the edge of the counter.

  Snow has filled out the peaks on the tops of rotted fenceposts.

  It has walked down to meet the slough water,

  And fills all the steps of the ladder leaning against the eaves.

  It rests on the doorsills of collapsing children’s houses,

  And on transformer boxes held from the ground forever in the center of cornfields.

  A man lies down to sleep.

  Hawks and crows gather around his bed.

  Grass shoots up between the hawks’ toes.

  Each blade of grass is a voice.

  The sword by his side breaks into flame.

  IN DANGER FROM THE OUTER WORLD

  This burning in the eyes as we open doors,

  This is only the body burdened down with leaves,

  The opaque flesh, heavy as November grass,

  Growing stubbornly, triumphant even at midnight.

  And another day disappears into the cliff,

  And the Eskimos come to greet it with sharp cries—

  The black water swells up over the new hole,

  The grave moves forward from its ambush,

  Moving over the hills on black feet,

  Living off the country,

  Leaving dogs and sheep murdered where it slept;

  Some shining thing, inside, that has served us well

  Shakes its bamboo bars—

  It may be gone before we wake . . .

 
; THE FIRE OF DESPAIR HAS BEEN OUR SAVIOUR

  Today, autumn.

  Heaven’s roots are still.

  O holy trees, rejoicing ruin of leaves,

  How easily we see spring coming in your black branches!

  Not like the Middle Ages! Then iron ringing iron

  At dawn, chill wringing

  The grass, clatter of saddles,

  The long flight on borrowed stone

  Into the still air sobered by the hidden joy of crows.

  Or the Ice Age!

  Another child dead,

  Turning bone stacks for bones, sleeves of snow blowing

  Down from above, no tracks in the snow, in agony

  Man cried out—like the mad hog, pierced, again,

  Again, by teeth-spears, who

  Grew his horny scales

  From sheer despair—instants

  Finally leading out of the snowbound valley!

  This autumn, I

  Cannot find the road

  That way: the things that we must grasp,

  The signs, are gone, hidden by spring and fall, leaving

  A still sky here, a dusk there,

  A dry cornleaf in a field; where has the road gone? All

  Trace lost, like a ship sinking,

  Where what is left and what goes down both bring despair.

  Not finding the road, we are slowly pulled down.

  LOOKING AT SOME FLOWERS

  Light is around the petals, and behind them:

  Some petals are living on the other side of the light.

  Like sunlight drifting onto the carpet

  Where the casket stands, not knowing which world it is in.

  And fuzzy leaves, hair growing from some animal

  Buried in the green trenches of the plant.

  Or the ground this house is on,

  Only free of the sea for five or six thousand years.

  V

  A BODY NOT YET BORN

  But when this had given me many a hard blow, doubtless from the Spirit that had a desire for me, I finally fell into great sadness and melancholy, when I viewed the great depth of this world, the sun and the stars and the clouds, rain and snow, and contemplated in my mind the whole creation of this world.

  So then I found in all things good and evil, love and wrath, in creatures of reason as well as in wood, in stone, in earth, in the elements, in men and animals. Withal, I considered the little spark “man” and what it might be esteemed to be by God in comparison with this great work of heaven and earth.

  In consequence I grew very melancholy, and what is written, though I knew it well, could not console me.

  —Jacob Boehme

  LOOKING INTO A FACE

  Conversation brings us so close! Opening

  The surfs of the body,

  Bringing fish up near the sun,

  And stiffening the backbones of the sea!

  I have wandered in a face, for hours,

  Passing through dark fires.

  I have risen to a body

  Not yet born,

  Existing like a light around the body,

  Through which the body moves like a sliding moon.

  HURRYING AWAY FROM THE EARTH

  The poor and the dazed and the idiots

  Are with us, they live in the casket of the sun

  And the moon’s coffin, as I walk out tonight

  Seeing the night wheel its dark wheelbarrow

  All about the plains of heaven,

  And the stars inexorably rising.

  Dark moon! Sinister tears!

  Shadows of slums and of the conquering dead!

  One man pierced his chest with a long needle

  To stop his heart from beating anymore.

  Another put blocks of ice in his bed

  So he would die; a woman

  Washed her hair, and hanged herself

  In the long braids. Climbing a high

  Elm above her lawn, another

  Opened a box, and swallowed poisonous spiders.

  The time for exhortation is past. I have heard

  The iron chairs scraping in asylums,

  As the cold bird hunches into the winter

  In the windy night of November.

  The coal miners rise from their pits

  Like a flash flood,

  Like a rice field disintegrating.

  Men cry when they hear stories of someone rising from the dead.

  THE HERMIT

  Darkness is falling through darkness,

  Falling from ledge

  To ledge.

  There is a man whose body is perfectly whole.

  He stands, the storm behind him,

  And the grassblades are leaping in the wind.

  Darkness is gathered in folds

  About his feet.

  He is no one. When we see

  Him, we grow calm,

  And sail on into the tunnels of joyful death.

  MAX ERNST AND THE TORTOISE’S BEAK

  1

  Floating in turtle blood, going backward and forward,

  We wake up like a mad sea-urchin

  On the bloody fields near the secret pass—

  There the dead sleep in jars. . . .

  2

  Or we go at night slowly into the tunnels of the tortoise’s claws,

  Carrying chunks of the moon

  To light the tunnels,

  Listening for the sound of rocks falling into the sea. . . .

  3

  Waking, we find ourselves in the tortoise’s beak,

  As he carries us high

  Over New Jersey—going swiftly

  Through the darkness between the constellations. . . .

  4

  At dawn we are still transparent, pulling

  In the starlight; high up near the stars,

  We are still falling like a room

  Full of moonlight through the air. . . .

  MOVING INWARD AT LAST

  The dying bull is bleeding on the mountain!

  But inside the mountain, untouched

  By the blood,

  There are antlers, bits of oak bark,

  Fire, herbs are thrown down.

  When the smoke touches the roof of the cave,

  The green leaves burst into flame,

  The air of night changes to dark water,

  The mountains alter and become the sea.

  RIDERLESS HORSES

  An owl on the dark waters

  And so many torches smoking

  By mossy stone

  And horses that are seen riderless on moonlit nights

  A candle flutters as a black hand

  Reaches out

  All of these mean

  A man with coins on his eyes

  The vast waters

  The cry of seagulls

  EVOLUTION FROM THE FISH

  This grandson of fishes holds inside him

  A hundred thousand small black stones.

  This nephew of snails, six feet long, lies naked on a bed

  With a smiling woman. His head throws off light

  Under marble; he is moving toward his own life

  Like fur, walking. And when the frost comes, he is

  Fur, mammoth fur, growing longer

  And silkier, passing the woman’s dormitory,

  Kissing a stomach, leaning against a pillar,

  He moves toward the animal, the animal with furry head!

  What a joy to smell the flesh of a new child!

  Like new grass! And this long man with the student girl,

  Coffee cups, her pale waist, the spirit moving around them,

  Moves, dragging a great tail into the darkness.

  In the night we blaze up, drawing pictures

  Of spiny fish; we throw off the white stones!

  Serpents rise from the ocean floor with spiral motions;

  A man goes inside a jewel, and sleeps. Do

  Not hold my hands down! Let me raise them!

  A
fire is passing up through the soles of my feet!

  WANTING TO EXPERIENCE ALL THINGS

  A blind horse stands among cherry trees.

  And legbones poking from cool earth.

  The heart leaps

  Almost up to the sky! But laments

  And filaments pull us back into the dark.

  Night takes hold of us.

  But a paw

  Comes out of the dark

  To light the road. I’ll be all right.

  I follow my own fiery traces through the night.

  OPENING AN OYSTER

  For Max Ernst

  We think of Charlemagne

  As we open oysters.

  Looking down, we see

  Crowds waving from islands inside the oyster shell.

  The neck swings to bite the dog.

  When the fishermen take in their floats

  They lift nets some giant fish

  Broke through at night.

  At dusk we start north with twenty dogs.

  Blowing snow

  Makes us lower our heads

  And miles of snow crust

  Go past between the runners!

  Westward the ice peaks

  Like vast maternity hospitals turned white by oyster shells!

  Going around the war hospital,

  We see a pebble

  That has drawn in the malignancy of the shark,

  Like a mammoth hair

  That melts an entire Russian county, drowning

  Chickens and cows—then we know that in attics there are