Collected Poems

by Robert Bly

CORNPICKER POEM

  1

  Sheds left out in the darkness,

  abandoned granaries, cats merging into the night.

  There are hubcaps cooling in a dark yard.

  The stiff-haired son has slouched in

  and gone to bed.

  A low wind sweeps over the moony land.

  2

  Overshoes stiffen in the entry.

  The calendar grows rigid on the wall.

  He dreams, and his body grows limber.

  He is fighting a many-armed woman,

  he is a struggler, he will not yield.

  He fights her in the crotch of a willow tree.

  He wakes up with jaws set,

  and a victory.

  3

  It is dawn. Cornpicking today.

  He leans over, hurtling

  his old Pontiac down the road.

  Somewhere the sullen chilled machine

  is waiting, its empty gas cans around it.

  PROPHETS

  Inside the body there is a field of white roses

  With prophets asleep in it—

  I see their long black feet.

  LISTENING TO A CRICKET IN THE WAINSCOTING

  Its sound is like a boat with black sails

  Or a widow under a redwood tree, warning

  Passersby that the tree is about to fall

  Or a bell made of black tin in a Mexican village

  Or the hair in the ear of a hundred-year-old man.

  THINKING OF TU FU’S POEM

  I get up late and ask what has to be done today.

  Nothing has to be done, so the farm looks doubly good.

  The blowing maple leaves fit so well with the moving grass,

  The shadow of my writing shack looks small beside the growing trees.

  Never be with your children, let them get stringy like radishes!

  Let your wife worry about the lack of money!

  Your whole life is like some drunkard’s dream!

  You haven’t combed your hair for a whole month!

  DIGGING WORMS

  Here I am, digging worms behind the chickenhouse,

  the clods fall open when I hit

  them with a tine, worms fall out . . .

  Dreams press us on all sides, we stagger

  along a wire, our children balance us

  on their shoulders, we balance their graves

  on ours.

  Their graves are light. And we unwind

  from some kind of cocoon made by lovers . . .

  the old tires we used to swing on,

  going faster, around and around, until

  with one lurch we grow still and look down at our shoes.

  Last night I dreamt my carelessness started stones dislodging near a castle. The stones

  did not hurt my shoulders when they hit and went through,

  but the wall of the castle fell.

  WALKING AND SITTING

  That’s odd—I am trying to sit still,

  trying to hold the mind to one thing.

  Meanwhile angleworms stretch out thin in the gravel,

  while it is thundering.

  A LONG WALK BEFORE THE SNOWS BEGAN

  1

  Nearly winter. All day the sky gray. Earth heavy.

  The cornfields dead. I walk over the soaked

  cornstalks knocked flat in rows,

  a few grains of white sleet on the leaves.

  2

  White sleet also in the black plowing.

  I turn and go west—tracks, pushed deep!

  I am walking with an immense deer.

  He passed three days ago.

  3

  It must be that I will die one day!

  I see my body lying stretched out.

  A woman whose face I cannot see stands near my body.

  A column of smoke rises from Vonderharr’s field.

  4

  I reach the creek at last, nearly dusk.

  New snow on the river ice, under willow branches,

  open places like the plains of North China,

  where the mice have been, just a half hour ago.

  A DREAM ON THE NIGHT OF FIRST SNOW

  I woke from a first-day-of-snow dream.

  I met a girl in an attic,

  who talked of operas, intensely.

  Snow has bent the poplar over nearly to the ground,

  new snowfall widens the plowing.

  Outside, maple leaves float on rainwater,

  yellow, matted, luminous.

  I saw a salamander . . . I took him up . . .

  he was cold. When I put him down again,

  he strode over a log

  with such confidence, like a chessmaster,

  the front leg first, then the hind

  leg he rose up like a tractor climbing

  over a hump in the field

  and disappeared toward winter, a caravan going deeper into mountains,

  dogs pulling travois,

  feathers fluttering on the lances of the arrogant men.

  A WALK

  It is a pale tree,

  all alone in January snow.

  Beneath it a shoot

  eaten pale by a rabbit . . .

  Looking up I see the farmyards with their grooves—

  the pines somber,

  made for winter, they knew it would come . . .

  And the cows inside the barn, caring nothing for all this,

  their noses in the incense hay,

  half-drunk, dusk comes as it was promised

  to them by their savior.

  FOR MY BROTHER, A YEAR AFTER HIS DEATH

  Last night, full moon.

  The snowy fields, the roads silent and alone.

  Clods rose above the snow in the plowing west,

  like mountaintops, or the chests of graves.

  PASSING A SPANISH ORCHARD BY TRAIN

  Grass high under apple trees:

  The bark of the trees rough and sexual,

  The grass growing heavy and uneven.

  We cannot bear distance,

  As the rocks do, swaying nakedly

  In open fields. You know an apple

  Does not survive a blow.

  One slight bruise and we die!

  How many men my age died in the war!

  I know no one on this train.

  A man comes walking down the aisle.

  I want to tell him

  That I forgive him, that I want him

  To forgive me.

  II

  WOMEN WE NEVER SEE AGAIN

  There are women we love whom we never see again.

  They are chestnuts shining in the rain.

  Moths hatched in winter disappear behind books.

  Sometimes when you put your hand into a hollow tree

  you touch the dark places between the stars.

  Human war has parted messengers from another planet,

  who cross back to each other at night,

  going through slippery valleys, farmyards where rain has washed out all tracks,

  and when we walk there, with no guide, saddened, in the dark

  we see above us glowing the fortress made of ecstatic blue stone.

  FEAR FOR THE BRIDAL PAIR

  A private, misty day,

  With the lake as utterly cast down

  As a child. Anxious

  Wheels I cannot hear turn

  Over and over in sand.

  Willow leaves I cannot see shed light

  “Around the pale bride and groom.”

  ANT HEAPS BY THE PATH

  I love to stare at old wooden doors after working,

  the cough the ant family makes in ground,

  the blackish stain around screwheads.

  How much labor is needed to live our four lives!

  Something turns its shoulders. When we do work

  holes appear in the mountainside, no labor at all.

  THE ARTIST

  In his cabin with darkened windows
the solitary man

  Sang long and joyfully with Johann Sebastian Bach.

  When he opened the door he noticed with shock

  That the horse had turned his rump to the north;

  Snow had settled along the red slope of his back.

  The white roof stood calmly among black trees.

  Could a stone heron cry out after years of silence

  Though we, singing, never hear his cry gathering?

  Ah, the story says: Snow fell over the whole farmyard

  While the singer remained private, alone in his house.

  PULLING A ROWBOAT UP AMONG LAKE REEDS

  In the Ashby reeds it is already night,

  though it is still day out on the lake.

  Darkness has soaked into the shaded sand.

  And how many other darknesses it reminds me of!

  The darkness a father feels the moment a child is born,

  blood pouring from the animal’s neck,

  the slender metal climbing toward the moon.

  MOVING BOOKS TO A NEW STUDY

  First snow yesterday, and now more falling.

  Each grassblade has its own snow balanced on it.

  One mousetrack in the snow ahead,

  the tailmark wavering in

  between the footprints. Dusk in half an hour.

  Looking up I see my parents’ grove.

  Somehow neither the Norwegian culture

  nor the American could keep them warm.

  I walk around the barn the long way

  carrying the heavy green book I love through the snow.

  DRIVING MY PARENTS HOME AT CHRISTMAS

  As I drive my parents home through the snow,

  their frailty hesitates on the edge of a mountainside.

  I call over the cliff,

  only snow answers.

  They talk quietly

  of hauling water, of eating an orange,

  of a grandchild’s photograph left behind last night.

  When they open the door of their house, they disappear.

  And the oak when it falls in the forest who hears it through miles and miles of silence?

  They sit so close to each other . . . as if pressed together by the snow.

  AFTER A DAY OF WORK

  How lightly the legs walk over the snow-whitened fields!

  I wander far off, like a daddy longlegs blown over the water.

  All day I worked alone, hour after hour.

  It is January, easy walking, the big snows still to come.

  WALKING WHERE THE PLOWS HAVE BEEN TURNING

  The most beautiful music of all is the music of what happens.

  —old Irish tale

  For Gioia Timpanelli

  Some intensity of the body came to me at five in the morning. I woke up, I saw the east pale with its excited brood. I slipped from bed, and out the back door, onto the sleek and resigned cottonwood leaves. The horses are out, eating in the ditch . . . I walk down the road toward the west.

  I notice a pebble on the road, then a corn-ear lying in the ditchgrass, then an earthbridge into the cornfield. I cross the ditch to the backland where the plows turn, the tractor tires have married it, they love it more than the rest, cozy with bare dirt, the downturned face of the plow that looked at it each round . . .

  In the risen sun the earth provides a cornhusk in one place, a cottonwood in another, for no apparent reason. A branch has dropped onto the fence wire, there are eternities near, the body free of its exasperations, ready to see what will happen. There is a humming in my body, it is jealous of no one. The cricket lays its wings one over the other, a faint whispery sound rises up to its head . . . which it hears . . . and disregards . . . listening for the next sound . . .

  JULY MORNING

  The day is awake. The bark calls to the rain still in the cloud.

  “Never forget the lonely taste of the white dew.”

  And woolen-robed drummers call on the naked to dance,

  all the particles of the body shout together.

  Sitting on the disc, the mourning dove coos a porch, then a cathedral,

  then the two arms of the cross!

  He gives the nose, then the head, then the two ears of this rabbit

  hopping along the garden,

  then his death . . .

  After that we will be alone in the deep blue reaches of the river.

  AN EMPTY PLACE

  Empty places are white and light-footed. “Taking the road” means being willing to die, as the pigeon grass clump, that dies so quietly. There is a joy in emptiness. One day I saw an empty corncob on the ground, so beautiful, and where each kernel had been, there was a place to live.

  The eyes are drawn to the dusty ground in fall—

  pieces of crushed oyster shell,

  like doors into the earth made of mother-of-pearl;

  slivers of glass,

  a white chicken’s feather that still seems excited by the warm blood,

  and a corncob, all kernels gone, room after room in its endless palace . . .

  this is the palace, the place of many mansions,

  which Christ has gone to prepare for us.

  PRAYER SERVICE IN AN ENGLISH CHURCH

  Looking at the open page of the psalm book,

  I see a ghostly knot floating in the paper!

  Circles within circles on the page, floating,

  showing that a branch once lived there!

  Looking at the knot long and long,

  I hear the priest call on the Saviour to come again.

  The old around me keep on singing . . .

  If the Saviour is a branch, how can he come again?

  And the last day . . .

  the whispers we will make from the darkening pillow . . .

  FISHING ON A LAKE AT NIGHT

  Someone has left a light on at the boathouse

  to guide the fishermen back after dark.

  The light makes no sound as it comes.

  It flies over the waves like a bird with one wing.

  Its path is a boatful of the dead, trying to return to life

  over the broken waters.

  And the light

  simply comes, bearing no gifts,

  as if the camels had arrived without the Wise Men.

  It is steady, holding us to our old mountain home.

  Now as we watch the moon rises over the popple forest.

  It too arrives without fuss,

  it goes between the boards around the pulp-cutter’s house—

  the same fence we pass through by opening the gate.

  NIGHT OF FIRST SNOW

  Night of first snow.

  I stand, my back against a board fence.

  The fir trees are black at the trunk, white out on the edges.

  The earth balances all around my feet.

  The apple trunk joins the white ground with what is above.

  Fir branches balance the snow.

  I too am a dark shape vertical to the earth.

  All over the sky, the gray color that pleases the snow mother.

  A woman wades out toward the wicker basket, floating,

  rocking in darkening reeds.

  The child and the light are half asleep.

  What is human lies in the way the basket is rocking.

  Black and white end in the gray color of the sky.

  What is human lies in the three hairs, caught,

  the rabbit left behind

  as he scooted under the granary joist.

  MOSES’ BASKET

  I don’t know if we love most the divine

  Or the human. The Pharaoh’s wife at dawn—

  Do you remember?—wades out into the reeds.

  The baby and the Pharaoh are about to meet.

  Moses’ basket floated on Red Sea water.

  And the reeds, weren’t they beautifully delicate,

  Alluvial, bird-filled, and marshy . . .

  The sweet hair of the Water Mother?

  They
were. We cherish nothing more than the reeds.

  But it is the basket with the baby in it,

  Rocking in darkening reeds, that our eyes love to see,

  And the curving lines the basket makes in the river water.

  THE CROW’S HEAD

  Suppertime. I leave my cabin and start toward the house. Something blowing among the tree trunks . . . our frail impulses go to shelter behind thin trees, or sail with the wind. A day of solitude over . . . the time when after long hours alone, I sit with my children, and feel them near. . . . At what I want to do I fail fifty times a day, and am confused. At last I go to bed.

  I wake before dawn hearing strong wind around the north bedroom windows. On the way to the cabin, I see dust of snow lying on yesterday’s ice. All morning snow falls.

  Snow continues all morning. By noon I give up working, and lie listening to the wind that rises and falls. Sometimes it makes the sound of a woman’s skirt pulled swiftly along the floor. . . . At other times it gives a slow growl without anger like the word “Enoch.” . . .