by Robert Bly
The Arctic moose drinks at the tundra’s edge,
swirling the watercress with his mouth.
How fresh the water is, the coolness of the far North.
A light wind moves through the deep firs.
MOUNTAIN GRASS
Rain falls on mountain grass; we remain close all day.
The fuchsia lifts its tendrils high.
I need you, to hold you, as mountain grass holds rain.
Dampness falls on dampness; rain on wet earth.
I am the traveler on the mountain who keeps repeating his cry.
WHAT WE PROVIDE
Every breath taken in by the man
who loves, and the woman who loves,
goes to fill the water tank
where the spirit horses drink.
POEM ON SLEEP
“Then the bright being disguised as a seal dove into the deep billows.”
I go on loving you after we are asleep.
I know the ledges where we sit all night looking out over the briny sea,
and the open places where we coast in sleekness through the sea.
And where is the hunter who is cunning? The practical part of me?
Oh he is long since gone, dispersed among the bold grasses.
The one he does not know of remains afloat and awake all night;
he lies on luminous boulders, dives, his coat sleek, his eyes open.
THE ARTIST AT FIFTY
The crow nests high in the fir.
Birds leap through the snowy branches
uttering small cries. Clumps fall.
Mice run dragging their tails in the new-fallen snow.
Year after year the artist works,
early and late, studying the old.
What does he gain? Finally he dreams
one night of deer antlers abandoned in the snow.
WORDS BARELY HEARD
The bear in his heavy fur rises from the bed.
The extravagant one he has left behind murmurs . . .
Or is murmured . . . Words barely heard.
Her face shines; and he turns back toward her.
THE CONDITIONS
What we have loved is with us ever,
ever, ever!
So you are with me far into the past,
the oats of Egypt . . .
I was a black hen!
You were the grain of wheat
I insisted on
before I agreed to be born.
A MAN AND A WOMAN AND A BLACKBIRD
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
—Wallace Stevens
When the two rivers
Join in the cloudy chamber,
So many alien nights
In our twenties, alone
On interior mountains,
Forgotten. Blackbirds
Walk around our feet
As if they shared
In what we know.
We know and we don’t know
What the heron feels
With his wing-
Tip feathers stretched
Out in the air above
The flooded lake,
Or the odorous constellations
The pig sees
Past his wild snout.
A man and a woman
Sit near each other. On
The windowpane
Ice.
The man says: “How
Is it
I have never loved
Ice before?
If I have not loved ice,
What have I loved?
Loved the dead
In their Sumerian
Fish-cloaks?
The vultures celebrating?
The soldiers
And the poor?”
And yet
For one or two
Moments,
In our shared grief
And exile,
We hang our harps
On the willows,
And the willows
Join us,
And the man
And the woman
And the blackbird are one.
III
THE MINNOW TURNING
Once I loved you only a few minutes a day.
Now it is smoke rising, the mushroom left by the birch,
and the horse’s forefoot, the way the minnow stirs silver
as he turns, carrying his world with him.
FIRMNESS
My fierceness when I hold you belongs
to the fir logs rolling on the shore.
And your affections coming toward me are the Oregon
islands disappearing in surf and mist.
CONVERSATION
I sat beneath maples, reading,
a book in my lap, alone all morning.
You walked past—whom I have loved
for ten years—walked by and were gone.
That was all. When I returned
to reading, not all of me returned.
My sex, or rosy man,
reached on its own and touched the book.
It must be some words have fur.
Or mute things exchange thought.
Or perhaps I am no longer
weary, grieving, and alone.
We know it’s true: the bee’s foot
knows the anther and its dwarves,
as the castle of women knows
of the rider lost outside in the trees.
SHAME
A man and a woman sit
among firs, looking eastward.
Sun is rising. Wind
from behind them lifts
them and carries them
over the fir needles.
They whirl, and the motion
carries them
down through the narrow
opening at the center.
Through it each must
pass, with toes curled out,
arms thrown back,
all shame gone.
THE HORSE OF DESIRE
“Yesterday I saw a face
that gave off light.”
I wrote that the first time
I saw you; now the lines
written that morning
are twenty years old.
What is it that
we see and don’t see?
When a horse swings
his head, how easily
his shoulders follow.
When the right thing happens,
the whole body knows.
The road covered with stones
turns to a soft river
moving among reeds.
I love you in those reeds,
and in the bass
quickening there.
My love is in the demons
gobbling the waters,
my desire in their swollen
foreheads poking
earthward out of the trees.
The bear between my legs
has one eye only,
which he offers
to God to see with.
The two beings below with no
eyes at all love you
with the slow persistent
intensity of the blind.
LISTENING TO THE KÖLN CONCERT
After we had loved each other intently,
We heard notes tumbling together,
In late winter, and we heard ice
Falling from the ends of twigs.
The notes abandon so much as they move.
They are the food not eaten, the comfort
Not taken, the lies not spoken.
The music is my attention to you.
And when the music came again,
Later in the day, I saw tears in your eyes.
I saw you turn your face away
So that others would not see.
When men and women come together,
How much they have to abandon! Wrens
Make their
nests of fancy threads
And string ends, animals
Abandon all their money each year.
What is that men and women leave?
Harder than wrens’ doing, they have
To abandon their longing for the perfect.
The inner nest not made by instinct
Will never be quite round,
And each has to enter the nest
Made by the other imperfect bird.
CONVERSATION WITH A HOLY WOMAN NOT SEEN FOR MANY YEARS
After so many years, I come walking to you.
You say: “You have come after so long?”
I could not come earlier. My shabby mouth,
with its cavernous thirst, ate the seeds of longing
that should have been planted. Awkward and baffled,
dishonest, I slept. And I dreamt of sand.
Your eyes in sorrow do not laugh.
I say, “I have come after so many years.”
WHAT MOVES AND DOESN’T MOVE
At night desire and longing enter, and we feel water
hurrying through a grassy place.
By dawn we know
all minglings, things of sorrow,
rings of Saturn, the raccoon’s wrist-joints and his smooth tail.
This is not Mozart, but a music more vulgar and grand.
Laughing we see the lizard hurry
to become a mammal,
or go back to the worm, or be a bird.
It is early spring; fronds rise; the frog leaps here and there.
Outdoors the dawn drifts restless with all its odors,
from tree to tree, between the insects,
among the stars,
leaping from twig to twig.
I am with you, held always moving in the night valley.
THE HERON DRINKING
The bird dips to take some water in its bill.
You know we do not drink only with our hands.
We receive what nothing else can give.
We are thirsty for the heron
and the lake, the touch of the bill on the water.
THE GOOD SILENCE
Reading an Anglo-Saxon love poem in its extravagance,
I stand up and walk about the room.
I do not love you in a little way;
oh yes, I do love you in a little way,
the old way, the way of the rowboat alone in the ocean.
The image is a white-washed house, on David’s Head, in Wales,
surrounded by flowers, bordered by seashells
and withies. A horse appears at the door
minutes before a storm; the house stands
in a space awakened by salt wind, alone on its cliff.
I take your hand as we work, neither of us speaking.
This is the old union of man and woman,
nothing extraordinary; they both feel a deep
calm in the bones. It is ordinary affection
that our bodies experienced for ten thousand years.
During those years we stroked the hair of the old, brought in
roots, painted prayers, slept, laid hair
on fire, took lives, and the bones
of the dead gleamed from under rocks where the love
the roaming tribe gave made them shine at night.
And we did what we did, made love attentively, then
dove into the river, and our bodies joined as calmly
as the swimmer’s shoulders glisten at dawn,
as the pine tree stands in the rain at the edge of the village.
The affection rose on a slope century after century,
And one day my faithfulness to you was born.
We sit together silently at the break of day.
We sit an hour, then tears run down my face.
“What is the matter?” you say, looking over.
I answer, “The ship saileth on the salte foam.”
THE HAWK
The hawk sweeps down from his aerie,
dives among swallows,
turns over twice in the air,
flying out of Catal-Huyuk.
Slowly a seeing hawk
frees itself from the fog;
its sleek head sees far off.
And the ocean turns in,
gives birth to herring
oriented to the poles.
Oregon fir needles, pungent
as the proverbs of old men,
ride down the Rogue River,
enter the ocean currents.
Land and sea mingle, so we
mingle with sky and wind. A mole
told me that his mother
had gone into the sky,
and his father lay curled
in a horsechestnut shell.
And my brother is part of the ocean.
Our great-uncles, grandfathers,
great-grandfathers, remain.
While we lie asleep, they see
the grasshopper resting
on the grassblade, and the wolverine
sweeping with his elegant
teeth through the forest.
And they come near. Whenever
we talk with a small
child, the dead help us
to choose words. Choosing words,
courage comes. When a man
encouraged by the dead goes
where he wishes to go,
then he sees the long tongue
of water on which the whale
rides on his journey.
When he finds the way
long intended for him,
he tastes through glacial water
the Labrador ferns and snows.
IN THE MONTH OF MAY
In the month of May when all leaves open,
I see when I walk how well all things
lean on each other, how the bees work,
the fish make their living the first day.
Monarchs fly high; then I understand
I love you with what in me is unfinished.
I love you with what in me is still
changing, what has no head or arms
or legs, what has not found its body.
And why shouldn’t the miraculous,
caught on this earth, visit
the old man alone in his hut?
And why shouldn’t Gabriel, who loves honey,
be fed with our own radishes and walnuts?
And lovers, tough ones, how many there are
whose holy bodies are not yet born.
Along the roads, I see so many places
I would like us to spend the night.
MEDITATIONS
ON THE
INSATIABLE
SOUL
(1994)
I
MEN AND WOMEN
1
Horses go on eating the Apostle Island ferns,
Also sheep and goats; also the big-nostrilled moose
Who knocks down the common bushes
In his longing for earthly pleasure.
The moose’s great cock floats in the lily pads.
That image calms us. His nose calms us.
Slowly, obstinately, we retrieve the pleasures
The Fathers, angry with the Gnostics, threw away.
2
The glad body sings its four-leggéd tunes.
It has its honesty. Lovers know the obstinacy
Of the hippopotamus, the grunts that say to spirit,
Gone, gone. The lover’s body leaps at its own
Sweetness, snaps off blossoms with its teeth. Later
He seems good to her eyes, like a waterhole
Muddied by animals. Tristan and Isolde
Love their bawdy lodge, no north, no south.
3
We know that women, some women, want
Heaven and earth joined. Men, some men, want sawn
Boards, roads diverging, and jackdaws flying,
Heaven and earth parted. Women in their wildness
; Want storks dancing, daughters roving
On the mountainside, canvases with Venus
And a naked man, doves returning at dusk,
Cloths folded, and giants sitting down at table.
WAITING FOR THE STARS
1
How much I long for the night to come
Again—I am restless all afternoon—
And the huge stars to appear
All over the heavens!—The black spaces between stars—
And the blue to fade away.
2
I worked on things with my back to the window,
Waiting for the darkness that I remember
I saw from my cradle.
When I step over and open the door, I am
A salmon slipping over the gravel into the ocean.
3
One star stands alone in the western darkness:
Arcturus. Caught in their love, the Arabs called it
The Keeper of Heaven. I think
It was in the womb that I received
The thirst for the dark heavens.
THE MAN WHO WALKS TOWARD US
There is so much forgotten rock in the world
And so much blue, glacial ice crowding down to die,
So many overhangs on which no petroglyphs are ever found,
And so many ships that rise up and slip down with no iceberg near.