sits in a lousy tree,
and sings and sings
all goddamn day,
and what I do
is write it down,
in words
they call them:
him, and it, and her,
some story this
will sometimes tell
or not. The bird
can’t care, the
tree can hardly hold it up—
and me is least of all
its worry. What then
is this life all about.
Simple. It’s garbage
dumped in street,
a friend’s quick care,
someone who hates you
and won’t go way,
a breeze
blowing past Neil’s
malfunctioning dear ears,
a blown-out dusty room,
an empty echoing kitchen,
a physical heart
which goes or stops.
For you—
because you carry wit with you,
and you are there somehow
at the hard real times,
and you know them too—
a necessary love.
The Place
. . . Swoop of hawk—
or mind’s adjustment
to sight—memory?
Air unrelieved, unlived?
Begun again, begin
again the play
of cloud, the lift
of sudden cliff,
the place in place—
the way it was again.
Go back a day,
take everything, take time
and play it back
again, the staggering
path, ridiculous, uncertain
bird, blurred, fuzzy
fog—or rocks which
seem to hang in
imperceptible substance
there, or here,
in thought? This thinking
is a place itself
unthought, which comes
to be the world.
Learning
“Suggestion/recognition . . .”
The horse
at the edge of the pool,
or the horse’s ass,
the fool,
either end, sits
waiting for world
to resolve it—
Or in swirl
of these apparent facts,
contexts, states,
of possible being,
among all others,
of numbered time,
one or two
gleam clearly
there, now here—
in mind.
Corn Close
FOR BASIL BUNTING
Words again, rehearsal—
“Are we going
to get up into
heaven—after all?”
What’s
the sound of that,
who, where—
and how.
One wonder,
one wonders, sees
the world—
specifically, this one.
Sheep, many
with lambs,
of a spring morning,
on sharp slope of hill’s side,
run up it
in chill rain.
Below’s brook,
as I’d say,
a burn? a beck?
Goddamnit, learn it.
Fell fills eye,
as we lie abed.
Basil’s up and out
walking
with the weather’s
vagaries. His home is
this world’s
wetness
or any’s, feet
planted on ground,
and but
for trash can takes
weekly hauling
up and down,
no seeming fact
of age presently
bothers him.
Vague palaver.
Can I get the fire
to burn with wet wood?
Am I useful
today? Will I fuck up
the fireplace?
Drop
log
on my foot.
At breakfast we sit,
provided, tea’s steam,
hot scones, butter,
marmalade—Basil’s
incurious, reassuring
smile—and stories
of Queen E’s
garden party, the thousands
jammed into garden—
style
of a damned poor
sort . . . Consider
(at night) Corelli
gives lifetime
to getting it right:
the Twelve Concerti Grossi,
not Ives
(whom I love),
not makeshift,
tonal blather—
but sound meets sound
with clear edge,
finds place,
precise, in the mind.
Have you seen a hawk—
look out! It
will get you,
blurred,
patient person,
drinking, eating,
sans body, sans
history, in-
telligence, etc.
Oh, I think
the words come from
the world and go
“I know
not
where . . .”
Their breasts banging—
flap—on their breastbones
makes the dear sound—
like tire tread
pulled from the shoe—
flap flap, bangs the body,
chortles, gurgles,
wheezes, breathes,
“Camptown race is (?)
five miles long!”
Back on the track,
you asshole.
No excuses,
no
“other things to do”—
And Wyatt’s
flight through the night
is an honest
apprehension:
They flee
from me
that sometime did me seek . . .
When we’d first come,
our thought
was to help him,
old friend, and brought
such scanty makeshift
provision, in retrospect
I blush—as who
would give to Northumbrian
Teacher’s
as against Glenfiddich—
which he had.
Was I scared
old friend
would be broken
by world
all his life
had lived in,
or that art,
his luck,
had gone sour?
My fear
is my own.
He got
the car started
after I tried
and tried, felt
battery fading,
mist-sodden spark plugs—
despair!
He had a wee can
in his hand,
and he sprayed
minute part
of its contents—
phfft!—on car’s motor,
and car starts,
by god. What wonder
more than
to be where you are,
and to know it?
All’s here.
The Children
AFTER PATRICK KAVANAGH
Down on the sidewalk recurrent
children’s forms, reds, greens,
walking along with the watching
elders not their own.
It’s winter, grows colder and colder.
How to play today without sun?
Will summer, gone, come again?
Will I only grow older and older?
Not wise enough yet to know
you’re only here at
all
as the wind blows, now
as the fire burns low.
Three
Desultory Days
FOR PETER WARSHALL
Desultory days,
time’s wandering
impermanences—
like, what’s for lunch,
Mabel? Hunks
of unwilling
meat got chopped
from recalcitrant
beasts? “No tears
for this vision”—
nor huge strawberries
zapped from forlorn Texas,
too soon, too soon . . .
We will meet again
one day, we will
gather at the river
(Paterson perchance)
so turgidly oozes by,
etc. Nothing new in the world
but us, the human
parasite eats up
that self-defined reality
we talked about in
ages past. Now prophecy declares,
got to get on with it,
back to the farm, else die
in streets inhuman
’spite we made them every one.
Ah friends, before I die,
I want to sit awhile
upon this old world’s knee,
yon charming hill, you see,
and dig the ambient breezes,
make of life
such gentle passing pleasure!
Were it then wrong
to avoid, as might be said,
the heaped-up canyons of the dead—
L.A.’s drear smut, and N.Y.C.’s
crunched millions? I don’t know.
It seems to me
what can salvation be
for less than 1%
of so-called population
is somehow latent fascism
of the soul. What leaves behind
those other people,
like they say,
reneges on Walter Whitman’s
19th century Mr. Goodheart’s
Lazy Days and Ways In Which
we might still save the world.
I loved it but
I never could believe it—
rather, the existential
terror of New England
countrywoman, Ms.
Dickinson: “The Brain, within its Groove
Runs evenly—and true—
But let a Splinter swerve—
“’Twere easier for You—//
To put a Current back—
When Floods have slit the Hills—
“And scooped a Turnpike for Themselves—
And Trodden out the Mills—”
moves me. My mind
to me a nightmare is—
that thought of days,
years, went its apparent way
without itself, with
no other company than thought.
So—born to die—why
take everything with us?
Why the meagerness
of life deliberately,
why the patience
when of no use,
and the anger, when it is?
I am no longer
one man—
but an old one
who is human again
after a long time,
feels the meat contract,
or stretch, upon bones,
hates to be alone
but can’t stand interruption.
Funny
how it all works out,
and Asia is
after all how much money
it costs—
either to buy or to sell it.
Didn’t they have a
world too? But then
they don’t look like us,
do they? But they’ll get us,
someone will—they’ll find us,
they won’t leave us here
just to die
by ourselves
all alone?
Arroyo
Out the window,
across the ground there,
persons walk
in the hard sun—
Like years ago we’d watch
the children go to school
in the vacant building now
across the arroyo.
Same persons,
Mr. Gutierrez and,
presumably, his son,
Victor, back from the army—
Would wave to me
if I did to them,
call que tal, hello,
across the arroyo.
How sentimental,
heartfelt, this life becomes
when you try to think of it,
say it in simple words—
How far in time and space
the distance,
the simple division of a ditch,
between people.
For John Duff
“I placed a jar in Tennessee . . .”
—WALLACE STEVENS, “ANECDOTE OF THE JAR”
Blast of harsh
flat sunlight
on recalcitrant ground
after rain. Ok.
Life in N.M. is
not a tourist’s paradise,
not the solar
energy capital
of the world, not
your place in the sun. If
I had my way,
I’d be no doubt
long gone. But
here I am and we talk
of plastic America,
of other friends
other places. What
will we do
today. When
will heart’s peace
descend in rippling, convenient
waves. Why
is the sky still
so high.
What’s
underfoot.
I don’t
feel comfortable with Indians—
and the Mexican
neighbors with
seventeen kids—
what time exists
now still to
include them.
Ok. A day
goes by. Night
follows. On the slight
lip of earth
down from the gate
at the edge of
the arroyo
sits
a menhir—
remember
that oar
you could screw into
ground, say,
here I’ll build a city?
No way.
This column
is common
old stretcher
cement blocks.
Put one on one
in pairs, first this way,
then that, you get
a house,
explicit, of the mind,
both thought
and the senses provoke it—
you see it—
you feel and think
this world.
It’s a quiet
grey column,
handsome—“the one
missing color”—
and it’s here now
forever,
no matter
it falls in a day.
Ok, John.
When you’re gone,
I’ll remember
also forever
the tough dear
sentiment, the clarity,
of your talking, the care.
And this it
you gave us:
here
is all the wonder,
there
is all there is.
Talk
One thing, strikes in,
recall, anyone talking
got to be to human
or something, like a rock,
a “song,” a thing to
talk to, to talk to.
Poor
Nothing’s
today and
tomorrow only.
&
nbsp; .
Slow-
er.
.
Place-
ss.
.
POOR
Pur-
pose por-
puss.
.
Sore hand.
.
Got
to get going.
.
And I was
not asleep
and I was
not alone.
Touchstone
FOR L. Z.
“Something
by which
all else
can be measured.”
Something
by which
to measure
all else.
Morning (8:10 AM)
In sun’s
slow rising
this morning
antenna tower
catches
the first light,
shines
for an instant
silver
white,
separate
from the houses,
the trees,
old woman walking
on street out front.
Eye o’ the Storm
Weather’s a funny
factor, like once
day breaks, storm’s
lifted, or come,
faces, eyes,
like clouds drift
over this world,
are all there is
of whatever there is.
On a Theme by Lawrence, Hearing Purcell
Knowing what
knowing is,
think less
of your life as labor.
Pain’s increase,
thought’s random torture,
grow with intent.
Simply live.
This Day
This day after
Thanksgiving the edge
of winter
comes closer.
This grey, dulled
morning the sky
closes down on
the horizon to make
one wonder
if a life lives more
than just looking,
knowing nothing more.
Yet such a gentle
light, faded,
domestic,
impermanent—
one will not
go farther than home
to see this world
so quietly, greyly, shrunken.
The Last Mile
FOR JACK CLARKE
What’s to be said
of friend dead—
eight years later?
Should he have waited
for whatever
here comes together
to make a use
for these friends and fools
must need excuse
for testament, for
interpretation,
for their own investment?
You know the world
is one big blow—
that’s all.
I’m here as well, now
unable to say
what it is or was,
he said, more than to stay
in the body
all the way
to the grave, as it happens,
The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley Page 8
