shadowed eyes.
.
Great
shade of orange.
.
I don’t do this
for nothing yet.
.
Hours
pass.
.
Here
Sounds like ball
in bowling alley.
Music’s
underneath it.
Clapped
hands.
Hums
of various conversations,
people sitting out
on couches,
wide,
low ceilinged space.
Kimonoed kid
sits on floor with buddy.
.
Three.
Straight up.
.
Each one
trying to stay someone.
En Route San Francisco
Say Something
Say something
to me. “Could you
help me with
this . . .” Such
possibly the woman’s
(Thailand) speech
in aisle adjacent,
plane’s body, going
through night. It’s
going home, with me—
months passed,
things happened in.
I need some
summary, gloss
of it all, days
later. Last recall
was Bobbie in
the kitchen saying
apropos coat, “If
you don’t wear it
now, you never will . . .”
Or Bobbie, at airport,
re people—
“They all look
like R. Crumb
characters . . .” It
drifts, it
stays by itself.
.
Friends I’ve loved
all the time,
Joanne,
Shao—but
not so
simply
now
to name them.
.
I could get drunker
and wiser
and lower
and higher.
.
Peter’s
amulet
worked!
.
Kyoto
“Arthur’s friend’s
a nice man!”
.
Memory
Nancy finally
at the kitchen table.
.
Bobbie
Her voice,
her voice, her
lovely voice . . .
.
Now’s
the time.
.
Watching water
blast up
on window
Provincetown—
clouds, air, trees,
ground,
watching for
the next one.
.
One’s so neat
about it.
.
Echo
Faint, persistent
smell of shit.
.
Mommy
Kid’s been crying
so long.
.
If You’re Going to Have One
The Chinese, Koreans,
Filipinos, persons from
Thailand
“are better fathers and mothers.”
.
On Board
The mommy,
daddy
number.
.
God a
crying
kid.
.
Later
It feels things
are muddled again
when I wanted
my head straight—
in this empty place,
people sleeping, light
from another person
reading lets me see.
That’s talking about it.
This is—this is
where I’ve been before
and now don’t want to go back to.
.
No blaming anyone,
nothing I can’t do,
nowhere to be happy
but where I am.
.
Plans—the next
six months
all arranged.
.
You can see her face,
hear her voice,
hope it’s happy.
5/3
A Note
To move in such fashion through nine countries (Fiji was my first stop, so to speak) in a little over two months is a peculiarly American circumstance, and the record thus provoked is personal in a manner not only the effect of my own egocentricity, but, again, a fact of American social reality. The tourist will always be singular, no matter what the occasion otherwise—and there is a sense, I think, in which Americans still presume the world as something to look at and use, rather than to live in. Again and again, I found that other cultural patterns, be they Samoan, Chinese, Malaysian, or Filipino, could not easily think of one as singular, and such familiar concepts as the “nuclear family” or “alienation” had literally to be translated for them. Whereas our habit of social value constantly promotes an isolation—the house in the country, the children in good schools—theirs, of necessity, finds center and strength in the collective, unless it has been perverted by Western exploitation and greed.
Not long ago, reading poems at a communal center in Indianapolis, I was asked by a member of the black community to explain my going to such places as the Philippines and South Korea—where overtly fascist governments are in power—sponsored by our State Department. The same question was put to me by an old friend indeed, Cid Corman, in Kyoto. How could I answer? That I am American? That the government is mine too? I wish I might find so simply a vindication. No, I went because I wanted to—to look, to see, even so briefly, how people in those parts of the world made a reality, to talk of being American, of the past war, of power, of usual life in this country, of my fellow and sister poets, of my neighbors on Fargo Street in Buffalo, New York. I wanted, at last, to be human, however simplistic that wish. I took thus my own chances, and remarkably found a company. My deepest thanks to them all.
–R.C.
Later
Count then your blessings, hold in mind
All that has loved you or been kind . . .
Gather the bits of road that were
Not gravel to the traveller
But eternal lanes of joy
On which no man who walks can die.
–FROM PATRICK KAVANAGH, “PRELUDE”
One
Myself
What, younger, felt
was possible, now knows
is not—but still
not changed enough—
Walked by the sea,
unchanged in memory—
evening, as clouds
on the far-off rim
of water float,
pictures of time,
smoke, faintness—
still the dream.
I want, if older,
still to know
why, human, men
and women are
so torn, so lost,
why hopes cannot
find better world
than this.
Shelley is dead and gone,
who said,
“Taught them not this—
to know themselves;
their might Could not repress
the mutiny within,
And for the morn
of truth they feigned,
deep night
Caught them ere evening . . .”
This World
If night’s the harder,
closer time, days
come. The morning
opens with light
at the window.
Then, as now, sun
> climbs in blue sky.
At noon
on the beach
I could watch
these glittering
waves forever,
follow their sound
deep into mind
and echoes—
let light
as air
be relief.
The wind
pulls at face
and hands,
grows cold. What
can one think—
the beach
is myriad stone.
Clouds pass,
grey undersides,
white clusters
of air, all
air. Water
moves at the edges,
blue, green,
white twists
of foam.
What then
will be lost,
recovered.
What
matters as one
in this world?
The House
Mas-Soñer
Restaurat—Any—
1920 . . . Old
slope of roof,
gutted windows,
doors, the walls,
with crumbling stucco
shows the mortar
and stones
underneath. Sit
on stone wall adjacent
topped with brick,
ground roundabout’s weeds,
red dirt, bare rock.
Then look east
down through valley—
fruit trees in their rows,
the careful fields,
the tops of the other
farmhouses below—
then the city, in haze,
the sea. Look
back in time
if you can—
think of the
myriad people
contained in this instant
in mind. But the well
top’s gone, and debris
litters entrance.
Yet no sadness,
no fears
life’s gone out.
Could put it all right,
given time,
and need, and money,
make this place sing,
the rooms open
and warm, and spring
come in at the windows
with the breeze—
the white blossom
of apple
still make this song.
La Conca
Sand here’s like meal—
oats, barley, or wheat—
feels round and specific.
Sun’s hot,
just past noon, and sound
of small boat clearing headland
chugs against wash.
Light slants
now on rocks, makes shadows.
Beach is a half-moon’s
curve, with bluff,
at far end, of rock—
and firs look like garden
so sharply their tops
make line against sky.
All quiet here,
all small
and comfortable. Boat goes by,
beyond, where sky
and sea meet
far away.
Sea
Ever
to sleep,
returning water.
.
Rock’s upright,
thinking.
.
Boy and dog
following
the edge.
.
Come back, first
wave I saw.
.
Older man at
water’s edge, brown
pants rolled up,
white legs, and hair.
.
Thin faint
clouds begin
to drift over
sun, im-
perceptibly.
.
Stick stuck
in sand, shoes,
sweater, cigarettes.
.
No home more
to go to.
.
But that line,
sky and sea’s,
something else.
.
Adios, water—
for another day.
Flaubert’s Early Prose
“Eventually he dies
out of a lack of will to live,
out of mere weariness and sadness . . .”
And then he is hit by a truck
on his way home from work,
and/or a boulder
pushed down onto him
by lifelong friends of the family
writes FINIS to his suffering—
Or he goes to college,
gets married,
and then he dies!
Or finally he doesn’t die at all,
just goes on living,
day after day in the same old way . . .
He is a very interesting man,
this intensively sensitive person,
but he has to die somehow—
so he goes by himself to the beach,
and sits down and thinks,
looking at the water to be found there,
“Why was I born? Why
am I living?”—like
an old song, cheri—
and then he dies.
Barcelona: February 13, 1977
Grave, to the will
of the people,
in the plaza
in front of the cathedral,
at noon dance
the sardana—
“two policemen dead,
four arrested”—
ritual, formal,
grave, old and young,
coats left in heap
in the middle
of the circle, wind chill—
dance, to find will.
Place
This is an empty landscape,
in spite of its light,
air, water—
the people walking the streets.
I feel faint here,
too far off, too
enclosed in myself,
can’t make love a way out.
I need the old-time density,
the dirt, the cold,
the noise through the floor—
my love in company.
Speech
Simple things
one wants to say
like, what’s the day
like, out there—
who am I
and where.
Beach
Across bay’s loop
of whitecaps,
small seeming black
figures at edge—
one, the smallest,
to the water goes.
Others, behind,
sit down.
After
I’ll not write again
things a young man
thinks, not the words
of that feeling.
There is no world
except felt, no
one there but
must be here also.
If that time was
echoing, a vindication
apparent, if flesh
and bone coincided—
let the body be.
See faces float
over the horizon let
the day end.
For Pen
Reading, in the chair
in front of the fire
keeps the room both warm
and sparely human—
thinking, to where I’ve come,
where come from,
from what, from whom—
wanting a meaning.
None to hand but the days
pass here,
in dear company
takes mind of shy comfort.
I want the world
I did always,
small pieces
and clear acknowledgments.
I want to
be useful
to someone, I think,
always—if not many,
then one.
But to have it
be echo, feeling
that was years ago—
now my hands are
wrinkled and my hair
goes grey—seems
ugly burden
and mistake of it.
So sing this
weather, passing,
grey and blue
together, rain and sun.
Love
There are words voluptuous
as the flesh
in its moisture,
its warmth.
Tangible, they tell
the reassurances,
the comforts,
of being human.
Not to speak them
makes abstract
all desire
and its death at last.
Erotica
On the path
down here, to the sea,
there are bits
of pages
from a magazine, scattered,
the big tits
of my adolescence
caught on bushes,
stepped on, faces
of the women, naked,
still smiling out at me
from the grass.
In the factory,
beside which
this path goes,
there is
no one. The windows
are broken out.
A dump
sits in front of it.
Two piles of dirt
beyond that.
Do these
look like tits
too, some primordial
woman sunk
underground
breaking out,
up,
to get me—
shall I throw
myself down
upon it,
this ground
rolls and twists,
these pictures
I want still
to see. Coming back
a day later,
kids were stopped
at that spot
to look
as I would
and had—there the fact
of the mystery
at last—
“what they look like
underneath”—
paper shreds,
blurred pages,
dirty pictures.
Nature
FOR R. B. K.
Out door here—
tall as wall
of usual room,
slight arch at top—
sunlight
in courtyard
The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley Page 5
