Collected Poems

by Robert Bly

  I go to the window. The crow’s head I found by the bridge this summer, and brought home, rests on the window sash. Feathers edge its Roman beak. It is fierce, decisive, the one black thing among all this white.

  FROST STILL ON THE GROUND

  I walk out in the fields; the frost is still on the ground.

  It’s like someone just beginning to write, and nothing has been said!

  The shadows that come from another life

  gather in folds around his head.

  So I am, all at once. What I have

  to say I have not said.

  The snow water glances up at the new moon. It is

  its own pond. In its lake the serpent is asleep.

  LATE MOON

  The third week moon reaches its light over my father’s farm,

  half of it dark now, in the west that eats it away.

  The earth has rocks in it that hum at early dawn.

  As I turn to go in, I see my shadow reach for the latch.

  A DREAM OF RETARDED CHILDREN

  That afternoon I had been fishing alone,

  Far from home. Strong wind,

  Some water slopping in the back of the boat.

  Geese woke me several times that night.

  In my dream retarded children were playing,

  and one came near.

  And her teacher, face open, hair light.

  For the first time I forgot my distance.

  I took her in my arms and held her.

  The pale and cold dawn woke me.

  I walked on the dock,

  Fishing alone in the far north.

  THE SEVEN STARS OF THE GREAT BEAR

  The teeth of the black and shaggy pony rips grass from its roots.

  So the night rips light away from day

  Uttering the cry the crystal makes when it regains its twelve sides.

  Our earthly house stands between two fierce mountains.

  One mountain is a womb filled with black owls,

  The other a jagged grave that explodes the soul up into Sirius.

  The grave will eat this table, this pen, and these warm fingers.

  Yet the grass continues to lift itself into the horse’s teeth.

  Dragon lines sweep through our bodies as through the chalk hills.

  Minerals hidden in our veins feed the ores on Venus.

  The Great Bear is seven old men walking.

  THE TREE KNOCKED DOWN BY LIGHTNING

  After a long walk I come down to the shore,

  Where a cottonwood lies stretched out in the grass,

  A tree knocked down by lightning—

  Hollows the owls made now open to the rain.

  Like the two of us, the tree lies stretched out;

  It hasn’t moved from where it fell in the grass.

  It is so mysterious, waters below, waters above,

  So little of grief we can ever know!

  DREAM OF AN AFTERNOON WITH A WOMAN I DID NOT KNOW

  I woke up, and went out. Not yet dawn.

  A rooster claimed he was the sickle moon.

  The windmill was a ladder that ended at a gray cloud.

  A feed grinder was growling at a nearby farm.

  Frost has made clouds of the weeds overnight.

  In my dream we stopped for coffee, we sat alone

  near a fireplace, near delicate cups.

  I loved that afternoon, and the rest of my life.

  NAILING A DOCK TOGETHER

  The dock is done, pulled out on the lake. How I love

  putting my wet foot

  on the boards I sawed myself!

  It is a ladder stretching back to land. . . .

  So many secrets are still hidden.

  A walker digs up a tin box with secrets

  and then joyfully buries it again

  so that the night and day will remain fresh.

  The horse stands penned, but is also free.

  It is a horse whose neck human

  beings have longed to touch for centuries.

  He stands in a stable of invisible wood.

  AN EVENING WHEN THE FULL MOON ROSE AS THE SUN SET

  APRIL 11, 1976

  The sun goes down in the dusty April night.

  “You know it could be alive!”

  The sun is round, massive, compelling, sober, on fire.

  It moves swiftly through the tree-stalks of the Lundin grove as we drive past . . .

  The legs of a bronze god walking at the edge of the world, unseen by many,

  On his archaic errands, doubled up on his own energy.

  He guides his life by his dreams.

  When we look again he is gone.

  Turning toward Milan, we see the other one, the moon, whole and rising.

  Three wild geese make dark spots on that part of the sky.

  Under the shining moon the pastures leap forward.

  Grass fields rolling as in October, the sow-colored fields near the river.

  The rising one lights the pair of pintails alert in the shallow pond.

  It shines on those faithful to each other, alert in the early night.

  And the life of faithfulness goes by like a river

  With no one noticing it.

  OUT PICKING UP CORN

  It is late December. I walk through the pasture.

  Light on the hillocks, light

  On the grassy mounds eaten clean by horse teeth.

  Now the plowing—black clods turning up. My shoes

  Look for solid home;

  I look for ears of corn not discovered by deer.

  I am learning; I walk through the plowed fields, with a bag,

  Picking up corn for the horses.

  Some small pebbles shine in the late sun.

  Surely we do not eat only with our mouths, or drink

  Only by lifting our hands!

  Surely there are essences we absorb from the wild ground.

  “My master is up gathering ferns on the mountain.” What he picks

  Is something respectable people

  Do not want to take in, walking in fog near the cliff.

  THE MAN

  IN THE

  BLACK

  COAT

  TURNS

  (1981)

  I

  SNOWBANKS NORTH OF THE HOUSE

  Those great sweeps of snow that stop suddenly six feet from the house . . .

  Thoughts that go so far.

  The boy gets out of high school and reads no more books;

  The son stops calling home.

  The mother puts down her rolling pin and makes no more bread.

  And the wife looks at her husband one night at a party, and loves him no more.

  The energy leaves the wine, and the minister falls leaving the church.

  It will not come closer—

  The one inside moves back, and the hands touch nothing, and are safe.

  The father grieves for his son, and will not leave the room where the coffin stands.

  He turns away from his wife, and she sleeps alone.

  And the sea lifts and falls all night, the moon goes on through the unattached heavens alone.

  The toe of the shoe pivots

  In the dust . . .

  And the man in the black coat turns, and goes back down the hill.

  No one knows why he came, or why he turned away, and did not climb the hill.

  FOR MY SON NOAH, TEN YEARS OLD

  Night and day arrive and day after day goes by,

  and what is old remains old, and what is young remains young, and grows old.

  The lumber pile does not grow younger, nor the two-by-fours lose their darkness,

  but the old tree goes on, the barn stands without help so many years;

  the advocate of darkness and night is not lost.

  The horse steps up, swings on one leg, turns his body,

  the chicken flapping claws onto the roost, its wings whelping and walloping,

  but what is primitive is not t
o be shot out into the night and dark.

  And slowly the kind man comes closer, loses his rage, sits down at table.

  So I am proud only of those days that pass in undivided tenderness,

  when you sit drawing, or making books, stapled, with messages to the world,

  or coloring a man with fire coming out of his hair.

  Or we sit at a table, with small tea carefully poured.

  So we pass our time together, calm and delighted.

  THE PRODIGAL SON

  The Prodigal Son is kneeling in the husks.

  My friend, the steering column in his chest,

  Cried: “Don’t let me die, doctor!”

  The swine go on feeding in the sunlight.

  When he folds his hands, his knees

  On corncobs, he sees the smoke of ships

  Floating off the isles of Tyre and Sidon,

  And father beyond father beyond father.

  An old man once being dragged across

  The floor by his shouting son, cried:

  “Don’t drag me any farther than that crack on the floor—

  I only dragged my father that far!”

  So this dragging of father and son goes on

  Century after century after century.

  There are brothers, some favorites, some

  Not. Neither brother gets what he wants.

  My father is seventy-five years old.

  Looking at his face, I look into water.

  How difficult it is! Under the water

  There’s a door that the pigs have gone through.

  THE SENSE OF DECLINE

  The Farallones seals clubbed,

  Whales gone, tortoises

  Taken from islands

  To fill the holds; the Empire

  Dying in its provincial cities.

  No one to repair the baths;

  Farms turned over

  To soldiers; the judges corrupt.

  The wagon behind bouncing,

  Breaking on boulders, back

  And forth, slowly

  Smashed to pieces. This crumb-

  Ling darkness is a reality

  Too, the feather

  On the snow, the rooster’s

  Half-eaten body nearby.

  And other worlds I do not see:

  The Old People’s Home

  At dusk, the slow

  Murmur of conversation.

  THE CONVICT AND HIS RADIO

  The child left alone on the butte calls out to his grandmother in the pine.

  She answers, the hide slips off the rack, the hatchet leaps up from the ground.

  The buffalo gallop, the cliff lies just ahead.

  Men shaped like stones lie waiting . . .

  They leap up flapping hides;

  the buffalo flow over the cliff, rib

  and leg bones splinter,

  a few roll down the pile and stagger off.

  The prison opens at last, the convict comes out carrying a cardboard box.

  No one can speak to him, his tongue by now is forgotten.

  He sits alone by a black radio.

  At night he cries, reaching for the small table by his bed.

  He does not stop all night,

  he cries until dawn.

  MOURNING PABLO NERUDA

  Water is practical,

  Especially in

  August.

  Faucet water

  That drops

  Into the buckets

  I carry

  To the young

  Willow trees

  Whose leaves have been eaten

  Off by grasshoppers.

  Or this jar of water

  That lies next to me

  On the carseat

  As I drive to my shack.

  When I look down,

  The seat all

  Around the jar

  Is dark,

  For water doesn’t intend

  To give, it gives

  Anyway,

  And the jar of water

  Lies

  There quivering

  As I drive

  Through a countryside

  Of granite quarries,

  Stones

  Soon to be shaped

  Into blocks for the dead,

  The only

  Thing they have

  Left that is theirs.

  For the dead remain inside

  Us, as water

  Remains

  Inside granite—

  Hardly at all—

  For their job is to

  Go

  Away,

  And not come back,

  Even when we ask them,

  But water

  Comes to us—

  It doesn’t care

  About us, it goes

  Around us, on the way

  To the Minnesota River,

  To the Mississippi River,

  To the Gulf,

  Always closer

  To where

  It has to be.

  No one lays flowers

  On the grave

  Of water,

  For it is not

  Here,

  It is

  Gone.

  II

  ELEVEN O’CLOCK AT NIGHT

  I lie alone in my bed; cooking and stories are over at last, and some peace comes. And what did I do today? I wrote down some thoughts on sacrifice that other people had, but couldn’t relate them to my own life. I brought my daughter to the bus—on the way to Minneapolis for a haircut—and I waited twenty minutes with her in the somnolent hotel lobby. I wanted the mail to bring some praise for my ego to eat, and was disappointed. I added up my bank balance, and found only $65, when I need over a thousand to pay the bills for this month alone. So this is how my life is passing before the grave?

  The walnut of my brain glows. I feel it irradiate the skull. I am aware of the consciousness I have, and I mourn the consciousness I do not have.

  Stubborn things lie and stand around me—the walls, a bookcase with its few books, the footboard of the bed, my shoes that lie against the blanket tentatively, as if they were animals sitting at table, my stomach with its curved demand. I see the bedside lamp, and the thumb of my right hand, the pen my fingers hold so trustingly. There is no way to escape from these. Many times in poems I have escaped—from myself. I sit for hours and at last see a pinhole in the top of the pumpkin, and I slip out that pinhole, gone! The genie expands and is gone; no one can get him back in the bottle again; he is hovering around a car cemetery somewhere.

  Now more and more I long for what I cannot escape from. The sun shines on the side of the house across the street. Eternity is near, but it is not here. My shoes, my thumbs, my stomach, remain inside the room, and for that there is no solution. Consciousness comes so slowly, half our life passes, we eat and talk asleep—and for that there is no solution. Since Pythagoras died the world has gone down a certain path, and I cannot change that. Someone not in my family invented the microscope, and Western eyes grew the intense will to pierce down through its darkening tunnel. Air itself is willing without pay to lift the 707’s wing, and for that there is no solution. Pistons and rings have appeared in the world; valves usher gas vapor in and out of the theater box ten times a second; and for that there is no solution. Something besides my will loves the woman I love. I love my children, though I did not know them before they came. I change every day. For the winter dark of late December there is no solution.

  THE WINEMAKER AND THE CAPTAIN

  1

  When a man like me steps out at dawn, it seems to him that he has lived his whole life to create something dark. All our work is inside the wine barrels in the hold of the ship. The casks roll about when the ship rolls, and no one in the crew knows what is in the casks but the captain.

  2

  The captain stands looking out over the taffrail in the dark, drawn by what follows in shoals behind him. Behind him, fins sail with intense forward strokes. The ship is going
to a harbor the captain has chosen, and the casks are rolling. That is all we know.

  3

  His ship remained tied to the dock for months as the captain lay ill on his pallet in the seaman’s home, imagining the covers were a Medusa with his mother’s face. And one day as he woke he was already on board. It must be that he hired the seamen, and bought the supplies, while still asleep. Now the ship is moving, and what does he know about those men he has hired? What are the islands like, where they were born; whom do they kneel to at night, fanning a fire of pencil shavings? Or was the seaman born in a farmhouse in Montana? Did he then pass into prison, and through it, as the earthworm passes through thoughtless soil?

  4

  Now the wine and the ship are passing over the Equator. And the winemaker, what of him? How many men and women, before we were born, have labored to produce the vines? First the grapes had to be brought from Europe and a climate found, calm and protective; then ground scouted out, difficult to discover with the unknown acids and mineral traces. And it takes so long for the vines to mature. Finally when they are grown, they are tough, twisted, resembling intense dwarf houses. And the winemaker still has to wait so many years before he can bring four casks to the ship.