Collected Poems

by Robert Bly

  WALKING IN THE HARDANGERVIDDA

  The mountain bushes move toughly in the wind. There has been a rain. And I love these stretches of new water, one or two inches deep, fifteen or twenty feet long, with green grass growing straight up out of them! The sun slanting in at late dawn makes little moats of light around the grass stems.

  Each grassblade has its own molecules of light around it, as they say a mountain where men are meditating always has white clouds above, as—they say—the roof of the dying saint gathers white storks.

  When I bend closer, the little motes of light disappear, and I can see the ecstatic earthbed, the brown blades of grass left from last year, like ruins of things we never did. And a few green blades entirely underwater, joy of the man who has lived.

  RENDEZVOUS AT AN ABANDONED FARM

  As we walk out at dawn we can still see the remains of the path the cows have beaten into the weedy earth, and the 75-by-40-foot barn that the farmer inherited and, as Thoreau said, “pushed before him all his life.” The barn is used now only for storing hay, the buildings rented out. The barn resembles some African trading post, abandoned when the secrets the Europeans hid caught up with them, and no one could give a “simple and sincere account of his own life.”

  The Germans and Norwegians who opened this land broke into the earth, ignoring the mother-love of the Sioux. The immigrants have sunk back now into their family Bibles; the great hinges have closed on them, and they sleep a coarse sleep—not forgiven. They know they have done wrong, and they go over and over the harness-hours, trying to see how they threw on the harness, how they happened to buckle things in the wrong order. And the souls of the immigrant women float crippled through the hayloft; the bodies are lacking an arm or foot; the missing parts have been sent to someone as a message, like those hands sent back by kidnappers in the Middle Ages.

  It is early dawn. Sunlight bounces from the roofs of the two cars that have brought us. Something is over, has finished here, and there is no comfort, there is no good thing to say.

  A CATERPILLAR

  Lifting my coffee cup, I notice a caterpillar crawling over my sheet of ten-cent airmail stamps. The head is black as a Chinese box. Nine soft accordions follow it around, with a waving motion, like a flabby mountain. Skinny brushes used to clean pop bottles rise from some of its shoulders. As I pick up the sheet of stamps, the caterpillar advances around and around the edge, and I see his feet: three pairs under the head, four sponge-like pairs under the middle body, and two final pairs at the tip, pink as a puppy’s hind legs. As he walks, he rears, six pairs of legs off the stamp, waving around in the air! One of the sponge pairs, and the last two tail pairs, the reserve feet, hold on anxiously. It is the first of September. The leaf shadows are less ferocious on the notebook cover. A man accepts his failures more easily—or perhaps summer’s insanity is gone? A man notices ordinary earth, scorned in July, with affection, as he settles down to his daily work, to use stamps.

  MORNING BY THE LAKE

  For Jim and Sue

  Wind blows, and lake water breaks over the bare lake-rocks no one loves. I walk about on bare feet an inch off the ground, and feel the longing to kneel down, to put my knees against the earth. Some thing in me flies out over the water like fragments of lightning, or a beam broken up into sparks.

  All at once I understand the Virgin and her candles, and I love the great gray body of the whale rolling in the sea, with his sides glistening, and I understand why my hair is up toward the clouds.

  That understander in me longs for a room with stone walls, deep bays, and morning sunlight, where a woman with shining arms is sitting.

  AUGUST RAIN

  After a month and a half without rain, at last, in late August, darkness comes at three in the afternoon, a cheerful thunder begins, and then the rain. I set a glass out on a table to measure the rain, and, suddenly buoyant and affectionate, go indoors to find my children. They are upstairs, playing quietly alone in their doll-filled rooms, hanging pictures, thoughtfully moving “the small things that make them happy” from one side of the room to another. I feel triumphant, without need of money, far from the grave. I walk over the grass, watching the soaked chairs, and the cooled towels, and sit down on my stoop, dragging a chair out with me. The rain deepens. It rolls off the porch roof, making a great puddle near me. The bubbles slide toward the puddle edge, become crowded, and disappear. The black earth turns blacker, it absorbs the rain needles without a sound. The sky is low, everything silent, as when parents are angry. . . . What has failed and been forgiven—the leaves from last year unable to go on, lying near the foundation, dry under the porch, retreat farther into the shadow, they give off a faint hum, as of birds’ eggs, or the tail of a dog.

  The older we get the more we fail, but the more we fail the more we feel a part of the dead straw of the universe, the corners of barns with cow dung twenty years old, the belts left hanging over the chairback after the bachelor has died in the ambulance on the way to the city. These objects ride us as the child who holds onto the dog’s fur; they appear in our dreams; they are more and more near us, coming in slowly from the wainscoting; they make our trunks heavy, accumulating between trips; they lie against the ship’s side, and will nudge the hole open that lets the water in at last.

  GRASS FROM TWO YEARS

  When I write poems, I need to be near grass that no one else sees, as here, where I sit for an hour under the cottonwood. The long grass has fallen over until it flows. Whatever I am . . . if the great hawks come to look for me, I will be here in this grass. Knobby twigs have dropped on it. The summer’s grass still green crosses some dry grass beneath, like the hair of the very old, that we stroke in the morning.

  And how beautiful this ring of dry grass is, pale and tan, that curves over the half-buried branch—the grass flows over it, and is pale, gone, ascended, no longer selfish, no longer centered on its mouth; it is centered now on the God “of distance and of absence.” Its pale blades lie near each other around the dry wood . . . this stick that the rain has not cared for, and has ignored, as it fell in the night, on men holding horses in the courtyard, and the sunlight was glad that the branch could be ignored, and did not ask to be loved—so I have loved you—and the branch and the grass lie here deserted, a part of the wild things of the world, noticed only for a moment by a heavy, nervous man who sits near them, and feels he has at this moment more joy than anyone alive.

  CHRISTMAS EVE SERVICE AT MIDNIGHT AT ST. MICHAEL’S

  For Father Richter

  A cold night; the sidewalk we walk on icy; the dark surrounds the frail wood houses that were so recently trees. We left my father’s house an hour before midnight, carrying boxes of gifts out to the car. My brother, who had been killed six months before, was absent. We had wept sitting near the decorated tree. Now I see the angel on the right of St. Michael’s altar kneeling on one knee, a hand pressed to his chin. The long-needled Christmas pine, who is the being inside us who is green both summer and winter, is hung with red ribbons of triumph. And it is hung with thirty golden balls, each ball representing a separate planet on which that eternal one has found a home. Outdoors the snow labors its old Manichean labors to keep the father and his animals in melancholy. We sing. At midnight the priest walks down one or two steps, finds the infant Christ, and puts him into the cradle beneath the altar, where the horses and the sheep have been waiting.

  Just after midnight he turns to face the congregation, lifts up the dry wafer, and breaks it—a clear and terrifying sound. He holds up the two halves . . . frightening . . . like so many acts, it is permanent. With his arms spread, the cross clear on his white chasuble, he tells us that Christ intended to leave his body behind. . . . It is confusing . . . we want to take our bodies with us when we die. I see waters dark and lifting near flights of stairs, waters lifting and torn over which the invisible birds drift like husks over November roads. . . . The cups are put down. The ocean has been stirred and calmed. A large man is flying over the water
with wings spread, a wound on his chest.

  OPENING THE DOOR OF A BARN I THOUGHT WAS EMPTY ON NEW YEAR’S EVE

  I walk over the fields made white with new snow and then open the double-barn doors: Sounds of breathing! Thirty steers are wandering about, the old barn partitions gone. Creatures heavy, shaggy, slowly moving in the dying light. Bodies with no St. Teresa look straight at me. The floor is cheerful with clean straw. Snow gleams in the feeding lot outside. The bony legs of the steers look frail in the pale light from the snow like uncles visiting from the city.

  Dust and cobwebs thicken the windowpanes. The dog who came with me stands up on his hind legs to look over the wooden gate. Large shoulders watch him, and he suddenly puts his legs down, frightened. After a while, he puts them up again. A steer’s head swings to look at the dog; it stares for three or four minutes unable to get a clear picture from the instinct reservoir—then bolts.

  But the steers’ enemies are asleep; the whole barn is asleep. The steers do not demand eternal life; they ask only to eat the crushed corn and the hay tasty with dust, and sometimes to feel an affection run down along the heavy nerves. Each steer has a lamp lit inside fluttering on a windy night.

  THIS BODY

  IS MADE

  OF CAMPHOR

  AND

  GOPHERWOOD

  (1977)

  Gendron would like to dedicate this book to:

  “All the waters of this world.”

  WALKING SWIFTLY

  When I wake, I hear sheep eating apple peels just outside the screen. The trees are heavy, soaked, cold and hushed, the sun just rising. All seems calm, and yet somewhere inside I am not calm. We live in wooden buildings made of two-by-fours, making the landscape nervous for a hundred miles. And the Emperor when he was sixty called for rhinoceros horn, for sky-blue phoenix eggs shaped from veined rock, dipped in rooster blood. Around him the wasps kept guard, the hens continued their patrol, the oysters open and close all questions. The heat inside the human body grows, it does not know where to throw itself—for a while it knots into will, heavy, burning, sweet, then into generosity, that longs to take on the burdens of others, and then into mad love that lasts forever. The artist walks swiftly to his studio, and carves oceanic waves into the dragon’s mane.

  A DAY ALONE

  My friend, this body is made of camphor and gopherwood. Where it goes, we follow, even into the Ark. As the light comes in sideways from the west over damp spring buds and winter trash, the body comes out hesitatingly, and we are shaken, we weep, how is it that we feel no one has ever loved us? This protective lamplit left hand hovering over its own shadow on the page seems more loved than we are. . . . And when we step into a room where we expect to find someone, we walk all the way over the floor and feel the bed. . . .

  THE SLEEPER

  He came in and sat by my side, and I did not wake up. I went on dreaming of vast houses with rooms I had not seen, of men suddenly appearing whom I did not know, but who knew me, of thistles whose points shone as if a light were inside.

  A man came to me and began to play music. One arm lay outside the covers. He put the dulcimer in my hand but I did not play it. I went on, hearing.

  Why didn’t I wake up? And why didn’t I play? Because I am asleep, and the sleeping man is all withdrawn into himself. He thinks the sound of a shutting door is a tooth falling from his head, or his head rolling on the ground.

  FINDING THE FATHER

  This body offers to carry us for nothing—as the ocean carries logs—so on some days the body wails with its great energy, it smashes up the boulders, lifting small crabs, that flow around the sides. Someone knocks on the door, we do not have time to dress. He wants us to come with him through the blowing and rainy streets, to the dark house. We will go there, the body says, and there find the father whom we have never met, who wandered in a snowstorm the night we were born, who then lost his memory, and has lived since longing for his child, whom he saw only once . . . while he worked as a shoemaker, as a cattle herder in Australia, as a restaurant cook who painted at night. When you light the lamp you will see him. He sits there behind the door . . . the eyebrows so heavy, the forehead so light . . . lonely in his whole body, waiting for you.

  THE OWLETS AT NIGHTFALL

  The sun is sinking. Each minute the air darker. The night thickens near the ground, pulls my body down to it. And if my body is earth, then what? Then I am down here, thickening as night comes on. The moon will float up there. Some part of me is up there too. How far it is up to that part!

  There are earth things, earthly, joined, they are snuggled down in one manger, one sweep of arms holds them, one clump of pine, the owlets sit together in one hollow tree. . . .

  When night comes what has been sun in me all day will drop underneath the earth, and travel sizzling along the underearth-ocean-darkness path. . . . There a hundred developed saints lie stretched out, throwing bits of darkness onto the road.

  At midnight what has been moon in me will also vanish. I will go down toward utter darkness and find myself in Joseph’s prison cell telling dreams to the baker.

  GOING OUT TO CHECK THE EWES

  My friend, this body is food for the thousand dragons of the air, each dragon light as a needle. This body loves us, and carries us home from our hoeing.

  It is ancient, and full of the bales of sleep. In its vibrations the sun rolls along under the earth; the spouts over the ocean curl into our stomach. Water revolves, making spouts seen by skull eyes at mid-ocean. This body of herbs and gopherwood, this blessing, this is a lone ridge patrolled by water. . . . I get up, morning is here. The stars are still out; the black winter sky looms over the unborn lambs. The barn is cold before dawn, the gates slow.

  This body longs for itself far out at sea, it floats in the black heavens, it is a brilliant being, locked in the prison of human dullness. . . .

  GALLOPING HORSES

  The horses gallop east, over the steppes, each with its rider, hard. Each rider carries a strip of red cloth raised above his head. The horses leap over a line of fire. Then a stream, they leap higher, hooves push into the mud. Then a crevice—space stretched out sideways—a few horses fall in. Now they meet their fourth obstacle—flesh. . . . It is a Garden, elephant trunks reach lazily up into tree branches, and the gazelles hurry over the plain like blood corpuscles in a storm, flock on flock, even the monkeys have hair. And the horses slow, they become confused among so many gentle animals, the riders look to the side and behind them, turning in their saddles to see the large animals peacefully grazing behind.

  A DREAM OF WHAT IS MISSING

  I dreamt all night such glad painful exultant dreams. Each scene was a tile of glazed and luminous clay. What does not have the senses longs for the senses. All longing is terrible and terrifying—a herd of gazelles running over the savannah—and intense and divine, and I saw it lying over the floor in layers there.

  All night I longed for my missing limbs. Lines of force at the bottom of Joseph’s well sent up lumps of dirt that heal the humpbacked; something rolled upward from the water, became a lion, that prowls around the rocky edges of the desert, keeping the hermit inside his own chest.

  THE OLD MAN WITH MISSING FINGERS

  This body holds its protective wall around us, it watches us whenever we walk out. Each step we take in conversations with our friends, moving slowly or flying, the body watches us, calling us into what is possible, into what is not said, into the shuck heap of ruined arrowheads or the old man with missing fingers.

  We take our first step in words each day, and instantly fall into a hole in the sounds we make. Overly sane afternoons in a room during our twenties come back to us in the form of a friend who is mad; every longing another person had that we failed to see returns to us as a squinting of the eyes when we talk, and no sentimentality, only the ruthless body performing its magic, transforming each of our confrontations into energy, changing our scholarly labors over white-haired books into certainty and healing power, an
d our cruelties into an old man with missing fingers.

  We talk one morning about the messy lives others lead, and in broad daylight the car slides off the road. Yesterday I offered advice as if I were adult; in my dream I saw a policeman holding a gun to the head of a frightened girl, who was blindfolded. We talk wisely of eternity; looking down, we see an old man with missing fingers.

  WALKING TO THE NEXT FARM

  It has been snowing all day. Three of us start out across the fields. The boots sink in to the ankles, but go on; our feet move through the most powerful snow energy. There is falling snow above us, and below us, and on all sides. My eyes feel wild, as if a new body were rising, with tremendous swirls in its flow; its whirlpools move with their face upward, as those whirls in the Missouri that draw in green cottonwoods from collapsed earth banks, pull them down with all their branches. And our feet carry the male energy that disappears, as my brother’s energy did, in its powerful force field his whole life disappeared, and all the trees on his farm went with it. . . .

  There is some sort of energy that comes off the fierce man’s hair. It is not a halo, but a background of flames. The energy increases, while “more and more docile men are being born each day.” As the Tibetan exhales, fifty pale men melt back into the ground. Huns fade back into the forest around Vienna, the doctor leaps up from his desk, he curses the stupidity of his life, grinds his teeth. Lenin refuses to eat with others. The carriage goes on through the night.