Collected Poems

by Robert Bly

  Alone on the jagged rock at the south end of McClure’s Beach. The sky low. The sea grows more and more private, as afternoon goes on; the sky comes down closer; the unobserved water rushes out to the horizon—horses galloping in a mountain valley at night. The waves smash up the rock; I find flags of seaweed high on the worn top, forty feet up, thrown up overnight; separated water still pooled there, like the black ducks that fly desolate, forlorn, and joyful over the seething swells, who never “feel pity for themselves,” and “do not lie awake weeping for their sins.” In their blood cells the vultures coast with furry necks extended, watching over the desert for signs of life to end. It is not our life we need to weep for. Inside us there is some secret. We are following a narrow ledge around a mountain, we are sailing on skeletal eerie craft over the buoyant ocean.

  WELCOMING A CHILD IN THE LIMANTOUR DUNES

  For Micah

  Thinking of a child soon to be born, I hunch down among friendly sand grains. . . . The sand grains love us, for they love whatever lives without force, a young girl who looks out over her life, alone, with no map, no horse, a white dress on. The sand grains love whatever is not rushing blindly forward—I mean the mole who is blinking at the door of his crumbly mole Vatican, and the salmon who one morning senses in her gills the fragrant Oregon waters crashing down. Something seems to love this planet abandoned here at the edge of the Milky Way, and this child floating inside the Pacific of the womb, near the walls, hearing the breakers roaring.

  TRESPASSING ON THE PIERCE RANCH

  I walk toward Tomales Point over soaked and lonely hills—a wild cat runs away from his inspection of a wet gopher hole as I come near. Wind off the sea. A few sheep, some cows with large udders high above the ocean.

  These cliffs are the first land the amazed traveler saw when looking over the rail he suddenly came on a continent . . . in the middle of the endless ocean.

  Glancing east, I see the three-quarters moon moving in broad daylight, pale and urgent, through the sky, freeing itself from itself in the clouds. It is a sturdy eye-traveler, sailing eerily forward, orphaned, bold and alone. Formed long ago, it has parted from the Earth as my moon from myself.

  Part of me sails steadily through clouds, and the rest of me is down here, among these soaked and lonely hills. These lowlands that are backed by the Coastal Range and again by the Rockies thicken eastward into Nebraska and the plateau that holds up the heavy pueblos, Taos, San Isidro, Isleta.

  There the old men hit the boys lightly with twigs as the boys run past, their heels hitting the earth, racing each other to the plaza, where a Douglas fir has been set up with a dead sheep tied to the very top. One of the winter boys arrives first. Then the clowns prepare to unhook the sheep from the sky.

  CLIMBING UP MOUNT VISION WITH MY LITTLE BOY

  We started up. All the way he held my hand. Sometimes he falls back to bend over a banana slug, then senses how lonely the slug is, and comes running back. He never complained, and we went straight up. How much I love being with him! How much I love to feel his small leafy hand curl around my finger. He holds on, and we are flying through a cloud. On top we hunker down beneath some bushes to get out of the wind, while the girls go off to play, and he tells me the story of the little boy who wouldn’t cut off his hair and give it to a witch, and so she changed him into a hollow log! A boy and girl came along, and stepped on the log—and the log said, “Oww!” They put their feet on it again, and the log said, “Oww!” Then they looked inside and saw a boy’s jacket sticking out. A little boy was in there! “I can’t come out, I’ve been changed into a hollow log.” That’s the end, he said.

  Then I remembered a bit more—the boy and the girl went to a wise man . . . he corrected me, “It was a wise woman, Daddy” . . . and said, “How can we get him changed back into a little boy?” She said, “Here is a pearl. If a crow asks you for it, give it to him.” So they went along. Pretty soon a crow came and said, “Can I have the buttons on your shirt?” The boy said, “Yes.” Then the crow said, “Can I have that pearl in your shirt pocket?” “Yes.” Then the crow said, “Now we’ll go to the witch’s house.” The crow flew up and dropped some moss down the witch’s chimney. The chimney got full, the witch started to cough. The crow dropped in some more moss. Then she had to open the door, and run outside! Then the crow took an oyster, a big one, from the Johnson Oyster Company, and flew high into the air, and dropped it right on the witch’s head. And that was the end of her. And then the log was changed back again into a little boy.

  The land on top is bare, sweeping, forbidding—so unlike a little boy’s mind. I asked him what he liked best about the whole walk. He said it was Bethany (an eight-year-old friend of Mary’s) going peepee in her pants while hiding.

  AN EXCURSION ON TOMALES BAY

  For Michael and Barbara Whitt

  The blue sky suddenly gone—fog. We cut the engine and drift. We glimpse a derrick on shore—it is a bird—a Great Blue Heron! He turns his head and walks away . . . like some old Hittite empire, all the brutality forgotten, only the rare vases left, and the elegant necks of the women. . . .

  Heavy bodies float nearby; we drift among them. Whiskered heads peer over at us attentively, like angels called to look at a baby. They have risen from their sea-mangers to peer at us. Their Magi come to them every day . . . and they gaze at the godless in their wooden boat. . . .

  Boulders lie piled on the shore . . . no . . . sea lions, hundreds of them! . . . Some on their backs playing. . . . Now the whole shore starts to roll seaward, barking and flapping. . . .

  Meanwhile, the whiskered heads have vanished; they are somewhere in the water underneath us. At last one head pops up five feet from the boat, looking neither arrogant nor surprised, but like a billfold found in the water, or a mountain that has been rained on for three weeks . . . and the Great Blue Heron, each wing as long as Holland, flies off, thin as a grassblade in the fog . . .

  CALM MORNING AT DRAKE’S BAY

  A sort of roll develops out of the bay, and lays itself all down this long beach. . . the hiss of the water wall, two inches high, coming in, steady as lions, or African grass fires. Two gulls with feet the color of a pumpkin walk together on the sand. A snipe settles down . . . three squawks . . . the gulls agree to chase it away. Then the wave goes out, the waters mingle so beautifully, it is the mingling after death, the silence, the sweep—so swift!—over darkening sand . . . the airplane sweeping low over the African field at night, lost, no tin cans burning, the old woman stomps around her house on a cane, no lamp lit yet. . . .

  FINDING A SALAMANDER ON INVERNESS RIDGE

  Walking. Afternoon. The war still going on, I stoop down to pick up a salamander. He is halfway across the mossy forest path. He is dark brown, fantastically cold in my hand. This one is new to me—the upper part of his eyeball light green . . . strange bullfrog eyes. The belly is a brilliant orange, color of airplane gasoline on fire; the back is a heavy-duty rubber black, with goose pimples from permanent cold. I make a kind of pulpit of my left hand, and turn him gently upright; his head and front legs look out at me, as his hands rest on my crossing thumb joint. Warmed, he grows lively, pulls himself out, and falls to earth where he raises his chin defiantly. I pick him up again. But he is patient, this war. I hold him again between thumb and forefinger for many minutes, and his front paws hold onto my thumb resignedly—perhaps I could hold him so for hours. Perhaps he could be held gently this way for days until he died, the green eyes still opening and closing. When I turn my wrist over, I see the long orange-black tail hanging down into the cathedral of the open palm, circling back and forth, rolling and unrolling like a snake. It hangs down like a rudder on some immensely long boat, a rudder that the men and women on board looking over the handrail do not see.

  SEAWATER POURING BACK OVER STONES

  Waves rush up, pause, and drag pebbles back around stones . . . the sound of pebbles going out. . . . It is a complicated sound, as of small sticks breaking, or kitchen sounds
heard from another house, the rustling when bodies turn over at night. . . . Now the retreating wave gets to the boulders, drops down over the stones always wet . . . the gentleness of William Carlos Williams after his stroke . . . Then we hear the sound of harsh death waves that race up the roof of leopard-colored stones, leaving a tiny rattling in the throat as they go out. . . . They leave the ecstatic brown sand stretched out between stones. We know that the anger of some young women is right.

  And always another sound: a heavy underground roaring in my ears from the surf farther out, as if the earth were reverberating under the feet of one dancer. That sound is a comforting sound, like the note of Paradise carried to the Egyptian sands; and I hear the driftwood far out singing; the great logs, fifty miles out, still floating in. The water under the waters is singing, what has not yet come to the surface to float, years that are still down somewhere below the chest. Long trunks are out there, too, that have floated all the way from the Pacific islands. . . . And the donkey the disciples will find standing beside the white wall . . .

  THE DEAD SEAL NEAR McCLURE’S BEACH

  1

  Walking north toward the point, I come on a dead seal. From a few feet away, he looks like a brown log. The body is on its back, dead only a few hours. I stand and look at him. There’s a quiver in the dead flesh: My God, he’s still alive. And a shock goes through me, as if a wall of my room had fallen away.

  His head is arched back, the small eyes closed; the whiskers sometimes rise and fall. He is dying. This is the oil. Here on its back is the oil that heats our houses so efficiently. Wind blows fine sand back toward the ocean. The flipper near me lies folded over the stomach, looking like an unfinished arm, lightly glazed with sand at the edges. The other flipper lies half underneath. And the seal’s skin looks like an old overcoat, scratched here and there—by sharp mussel shells maybe.

  I reach out and touch him. Suddenly he rears up, turns over. He gives three cries: Awaark! Awaark! Awaark!—like the cries from Christmas toys. He lunges toward me; I am terrified and leap back, though I know there can be no teeth in that jaw. He starts flopping toward the sea. But he falls over, on his face. He does not want to go back to the sea. He looks up at the sky, and he looks like an old lady who has lost her hair. He puts his chin back down on the sand, rearranges his flippers, and waits for me to go. I go.

  2

  The next day I go back to say goodbye. He’s dead now. But he’s not. He’s a quarter mile farther up the shore. Today he is thinner, squatting on his stomach, head out. The ribs show more: each vertebra on the back under the coat is visible, shiny. He breathes in and out.

  A wave comes in, touches his nose. He turns and looks at me—the eyes slanted; the crown of his head looks like a boy’s leather jacket bending over some bicycle bars. He is taking a long time to die. The whiskers white as porcupine quills, the forehead slopes. . . . Goodbye, brother, die in the sound of the waves. Forgive us if we have killed you. Long live your race, your inner-tube race, so uncomfortable on land, so comfortable in the ocean. Be comfortable in death then, when the sand will be out of your nostrils, and you can swim in long loops through the pure death, ducking under as assassinations break above you. You don’t want to be touched by me. I climb the cliff and go home the other way.

  THE LARGE STARFISH

  It is low tide. Fog. I have climbed down the cliffs from Pierce Ranch to the tide pools. Now the ecstasy of the low tide, kneeling down, alone. In six inches of clear water I notice a purple starfish—with nineteen arms! It is a delicate purple, the color of old carbon paper, or an attic dress . . . at the webs between the arms sometimes a more intense sunset red glows through. The fingers are relaxed . . . some curled up at the tips . . . with delicate rods . . . apparently globes on top of each, as at World’s Fairs, waving about. The starfish slowly moves up the groin of the rock . . . then back down . . . many of its arms rolled up now, lazily, like a puppy on its back. One arm is especially active and curved up over its own body as if a dinosaur were looking behind him.

  How slowly and evenly it moves! The starfish is a glacier, going sixty miles a year! It moves over the pink rock, by means I cannot see . . . and into marvelously floating delicate brown weeds. It is about the size of the bottom of a pail. When I reach into it, it tightens and then slowly relaxes. . . . I take an arm and quickly lift. The underside is a pale tan. . . . Gradually, as I watch, thousands of tiny tubes begin rising from all over the underside . . . hundreds in the mouth, hundreds along the nineteen underarms . . . all looking . . . feeling . . . like a man looking for a woman . . . tiny heads blindly feeling for a rock and finding only air. A purple rim runs along the underside of every arm, with paler tubes. Probably its moving-feet.

  I put him back in. He unfolds—I had forgotten how purple he was—and slides down into his rock groin, the snail-like feelers waving as if nothing had happened, and nothing has.

  III

  GOING IN A HELICOPTER FROM RIVERSIDE TO THE L.A. AIRPORT

  We are up. The wheel below my window hangs useless, like a crippled leg, shaking slightly.

  Los Angeles in the valley—we can see some white substance, held as if in a breakfast bowl, by the rim of hills. Smog. The particles of combustion slip out along the muffler tunnels, and are alone a few minutes on the freeway, before rising to meet this cloud. The cloud is white, like the watery milk with flies in it that the gold miners drink.

  And the freeways hurry through the streets, they are a hand sweeping pencils, photographs, fruit, everything, off the desk.

  We start to go down into the smog. It is all around us, ectoplasm coming from the medium now in anguish, beads of sweat stand out on his forehead, demons approach in the fog, the dead move around behind, surround him . . . he can’t get back. . . .

  THE PORCUPINE IN THE WIND

  For Galway Kinnell

  In half-light, I make out a shape near a tree trunk—a half-grown porcupine! He hurries clumsily—like a steam shovel—up the tree. Six feet up, he decides he has gone far enough and he waits, occasionally looking at me over a half-turned shoulder. Stepping up, I look into his eye, which is black, with little spontaneity, above an expressionless nose. He knows little about climbing, and his claws keep slipping on the gray poplar bark. His body apparently feels no excitement anyway to be climbing higher, toward the immaterial sky: he can’t remember any stories he has heard.

  Sun already down. The white needle-fur stands out, something pre-Roman, next to the elegant bark. As I listen I become aware of a third thing, still older. It is the wind through miles of leafless forest.

  VISITING THOMAS HART BENTON AND HIS WIFE IN KANSAS CITY

  The stone driveway is littered with chill leaves, damp in the November mist. We climbed the back porch of stone, the door opens. A man, who looks like a short tractor, comes out saying, “Come on in here!”; brushing us in with his hands. There was labor on the face; this was not the happy poet typing his poems twenty minutes a day, but the cattle driver walking through snow, the wrestler wrestling with the angel, lifting him up and driving him down to earth over and over, the joy of hard work, the thresher defeated at dusk by the weight of the bundles.

  We see on the wall a painting of his—a girl with a red hood. She looks at the wolf on the path; she is hesitant; she has seen no evil, having only seen her parents, and those not well; the light brown wolf is curious to talk to her; he has met her before, in another life: she cannot remember, though he can. She does not remember, and is about to lose the battle again (although we know the wolf will twist away toward the river wounded once more).

  Here are two boys in a canoe: water curves like lace around the island in the river that resembles an arm sleeping on a kitchen table; and the two farm boys in the canoe head toward the unknown falls of brightness—something they never experienced at home where their lantern at night fell on the sides of the patient Guernseys standing with their heads in prison.

  Thomas Hart Benton’s wife comes in, strong, radiant, triumpha
nt, as if she had survived the flesh, like some rocket that has returned from the moon and splashed down in a Russian meadow. Tom, as she called him, sits crouched on the sofa now, muttering strong phrases: “I used to go on tour . . . I’ve been all over this goddamned country . . . I got as far west as Lubbock in 1934 . . . you from Minnesota? Where’s the damn university? Minneapolis? Hell, I’ve been there.” His eighty-two-year-old head is full of Grant Wood memories and Vachel Lindsay. “I lived on the same floor as him in 1912, maybe . . . I didn’t know him well . . . in those days we were a poor lot” . . . a gurgling laugh . . .

  There’s a deep indentation in his forehead, starting near his right eye and going upward . . . above the forehead it forks, then the two forks join again deepening, and the line seems to sink into the upper sensual part of the brain.

  On the wall we see girls in short skirts out in the yard during the auction sale, as the mortgage storm comes on. The hungers of some traveling preacher has flowed into the girls who have known only linoleum floors and rickety kitchen tables. The traveling preacher has confused Jesus with the storms of deep sleep . . .

  In another painting, as the woman groans in labor, wolves fade back into the woods and the dancing girls drive their sexual energy into the ground (just as men drive nails). The energy flows down into the dead, who carry it to the throats of trees and up into the big branches, under which the half-asleep mule brushes at flies. His cock hangs down like a wagon tongue, and his long ears remind you of the long river down which we all float, sleeping and waking fitfully.