which is what scares us
then and now.
So much for the human.
No one more than any
ever did anything.
But we’ll still talk about it,
as if to get out of it,
be God’s little symbols . . .
At least to stand forth—
walk up the path,
kick the goddamn rock.
Then take deep breath
and cry—
Thank god I’m alive!
If I Had My Way
If I had my way, dear,
all these fears, these insistent
blurs of discontent would fade,
and there be
old-time meadows
with brown and white cows,
and those boulders,
still in mind, marked
the solid world. I’d
show you these ridiculous,
simple happinesses, the wonders
I’ve kept hold on
to steady the world—
the brook, the woods,
the paths, the clouds, the house
I lived in,
with the big barn
with my father’s sign on it:
FOUR WINDS FARM.
What life ever is
stays in them.
You’re young, like
they say. Your life
still comes to find
me—my honor
its choice. Here is the place
we live in
day by day, to learn
love, having it,
to begin again
again. Looking up,
this sweet room
with its colors, its forms,
has become you—
as my own life
finds its way
to you also,
wants to haul
all forward
but learns to let go,
lets the presence
of you be.
If I had my way, dear,
forever there’d be
a garden of roses—
on the old player piano
was in the sitting room
you’ve never seen nor will now see,
nor my mother or father,
or all that came after,
was a life lived,
all the labor, the pain?
the deaths, the wars,
the births
of my children? On
and on then—
for you and for me.
One
There are no words I know
tell where to go and how,
or how to get back again
from wherever one’s been.
They don’t keep directions
as tacit information.
Years of doing this and that
stay in them, yet apart.
As if words were things,
like anything. Like this one—
single—
sees itself so.
The Fact
Think of a grand metaphor
for life’s décor,
a party atmosphere
for all you love or fear—
let a daydream
make factual being,
nightmare be where
you live then.
When I’m sufficiently depressed,
I change the record,
crawl out into air,
still thankful it’s there.
Elsewise the nuttiness of existence
truly confuses—
nowhere to eat
if thousands starving give you meat,
nowhere to sit
if thousands die for it,
nowhere to sleep
if thousands cannot.
Thousands, millions, billions
of people die, die,
happy or sad, starved, murdered,
or indifferent.
What’s the burden then
to assume,
as ’twere load on back—
a simple fact?
Will it be right
later tonight,
when body’s dumped its load
and grown silent,
when hairs grow on
in the blackness
on dead or living face,
when bones creak,
turning in bed, still alive?
What is the pattern,
the plan, makes it right
to be alive,
more than you are,
if dying’s the onus
common to all of us?
No one gets more or less.
Can you hurry through it,
can you push and pull
all with you,
can you leave anything alone?
Do you dare to
live in the world,
this world,
equal with all—
or, thinking, remembering,
1+1=2,
that sign means one and one,
and two, are the same—
equality!
“God shed his grace on thee . . .”
How abstract
is that fucking fact.
Prayer to Hermes
FOR RAFAEL LOPEZ-PEDRAZA
Hermes, god
of crossed sticks,
crossed existence,
protect these feet
I offer. Imagination
is the wonder
of the real, and I am
sore afflicted with
the devil’s doubles,
the twos, of this
half-life,
this twilight.
Neither one nor two
but a mixture
walks here
in me—
feels forward,
finds behind
the track, yet
cannot stand
still or be here
elemental, be more
or less a man,
a woman.
What I understand
of this life,
what was right
in it, what was wrong,
I have forgotten
in these days
of physical change.
I see the ways
of knowing, of
securing, life grow
ridiculous. A weakness,
a tormenting, relieving weakness
comes to me. My hand
I see at arm’s end—
five fingers, fist—
is not mine?
Then must I forever
walk on, walk on—
as I have and
as I can?
Neither truth, nor love,
nor body itself—
nor anyone of any—
become me?
Yet questions
are tricks,
for me—
and always will be.
This moment the grey,
suffusing fog
floats in the quiet courtyard
beyond the window—
this morning grows now
to noon, and somewhere above
the sun warms the air
and wetness drips as ever
under the grey, diffusing
clouds. This weather,
this winter, comes closer.
This—physical sentence.
I give all
to you, hold
nothing back,
have no strength to.
My luck
is your gift,
my melodious
breath, my stumbling,
my twisted commitment,
my vagrant
drunkenness, my confused
flesh and blood.
All who know me
say, why this man’s
persistent pain, the scarifying
openness he makes do with?
Agh! brother spirit,
&nbs
p; what do they know
of whatever is the instant
cannot wait a minute—
will find heaven in hell,
will be there again even now,
and will tell of itself
all, all the world.
Mirrors
In Mirrours, there is the like
Angle of Incidence, from the Object
to the Glasse, and from the Glasse
to the Eye.
–FRANCIS BACON
One
First Rain
These retroactive small
instances of feeling
reach out for a common
ground in the wet
first rain of a faded
winter. Along the grey
iced sidewalk revealed
piles of dogshit, papers,
bits of old clothing, are
the human pledges,
call them, “We are here and
have been all the time.” I
walk quickly. The wind
drives the rain, drenching
my coat, pants, blurs
my glasses, as I pass.
Memory, 1930
There are continuities in memory, but
useless, dissimilar. My sister’s
recollection of what happened won’t
serve me. I sit, intent, fat,
the youngest of the suddenly
disjunct family, whose father is
being then driven in an ambulance
across the lawn, in the snow, to die.
The Edge
Long over whatever edge,
backward a false distance,
here and now, sentiment—
to begin again, forfeit
in whatever sense an end,
to give up thought of it—
hanging on to the weather’s edge,
hope, a sufficiency, thinking
of love’s accident, this
long way come with no purpose,
face again, changing,
these hands, feet, beyond me,
coming home, an intersection,
crossing of one and many,
having all, having nothing—
Feeling thought, heart, head
generalities, all abstract—
no place for me or mine—
I take the world and lose it,
miss it, misplace it,
put it back or try to, can’t
find it, fool it, even feel it.
The snow from a high sky,
grey, floats down to me softly.
This must be the edge
of being before the thought of it
blurs it, can only try to recall it.
Song
Love has no other friends
than those given it, as us,
in confusion of trust and dependence.
We want the world a wonder
and wait for it to become one
out of our simple bodies and minds.
No doubt one day it will
still all come true as people
do flock to it still until
I wonder where they’ll all find room
to honor love in their own turn
before they must move on.
It’s said the night comes
and ends all delusions and dreams,
in despite of our present sleeping.
But here I lie with you
and want for nothing more
than time in which to—
till love itself dies with me,
at last the end I thought to see
of everything that can be.
No! All vanity, all mind flies
but love remains, love, nor dies
even without me. Never dies.
The View
Roof pours upward,
crisscrossed with new
snow on cedar shingles
—grey-black and white—
blue over it, the
angle of looking through
window past the grape ivy
hanging from the top of it,
orange shaded light on,
place fixed by seeing
both to and from,
ignoring bricked window arch
across, just covered by
the light vertically striped
pinned to cross-rod curtain.
Human Song
What would a baby be
if we could see
him be, what would he be.
What stuff made of,
what to say to us,
that first moment.
From what has come.
Where come from—
new born babe.
What would he like,
would like us.
Would us like him.
Is he of pleasure, of pain,
of dumb indifference
or mistake made, made.
Is he alive or dead,
or unbegun, in between time
and us. Is he one of us.
Will he know us
when he’s come,
will he love us.
Will we love him.
Oh tell us, tell us.
Will we love him.
Time
FOR WILLY
Out window roof’s slope
of overlapped cedar shingles
drips at its edges, morning’s still
overcast, grey, Sunday—
goddamn the god that will not
come to his people in their want,
serves as excuse for death—
these days, far away, blurred world
I had never believed enough.
For this wry, small, vulnerable
particular child, my son—
my dearest and only William—
I want a human world, a
chance. Is it my age
that fears, falters in some faith?
These ripples of sound, poor
useless prides of mind,
name the things, the feelings?
When I was young,
the freshness of a single
moment came to me
with all hope, all tangent wonder.
Now I am one, inexorably
in this body, in this time.
All generality? There is
no one here but words,
no thing but echoes.
Then by what imagined right
would one force another’s life
to serve as one’s own instance,
his significance be mine—
wanting to sing, come
only to this whining sickness . . .
Up from oneself physical
actual limit to lift
thinking to its intent
if such in world there is
now all truth to tell
this child is all it is
or ever was. The place of
time oneself in the net
hanging by hands will
finally lose their hold,
fall. Die. Let this son
live, let him live.
Self-portrait
He wants to be
a brutal old man,
an aggressive old man,
as dull, as brutal
as the emptiness around him,
He doesn’t want compromise,
nor to be ever nice
to anyone. Just mean,
and final in his brutal,
his total, rejection of it all.
He tried the sweet,
the gentle, the “oh,
let’s hold hands together”
and it was awful,
dull, brutally inconsequential.
Now he’ll stand on
his own dwindling legs.
His arms, his skin,
shrink daily. And
he loves, but hates equally.
Greeting Card
FOR PEN
Expect the unexpected
and have a happy day . . .
Know love’s surety
either in you or me.
Believe you are always
all that human is
in loyalty, in generosity,
in wise, good-natured clarity.
No one more than you
would be love’s truth—
nor less
deserve ever unhappiness.
Therefore wonder’s delight
will make the way.
Expect the unexpected
and have a happy day . . .
Prospect
Green’s the predominant color here,
but in tones so various, and muted
by the flatness of sky and water,
the oak trunks, the undershade back of the lawns,
it seems a subtle echo of itself.
It is the color of life itself,
it used to be. Not blood red,
or sun yellow—but this green,
echoing hills, echoing meadows,
childhood summer’s blowsiness, a youngness
one remembers hopefully forever.
It is thoughtful, provokes here
quiet reflections, settles the self
down to waiting now apart
from time, which is done,
this green space, faintly painful.
The Sound
Early mornings, in the light still
faint making stones, herons, marsh
grass all but indistinguishable in the muck,
one looks to the far side, of the sound, the sand
side with low growing brush and
reeds, to the long horizontal of land’s edge,
where the sea is, on that
other side, that outside, place of
imagined real openness, restless, eternal ocean.
Retrospect
Thanks for
what will be
the memory
if it is.
One World
Tonight possibly they’ll
invite us down to the barricades
finally sans some tacit
racism or question of our authenticity.
No one will be ashamed he
has to face the prospect
of being blown up alone in
the privacy of his own home.
One can be looted, burned,
bombed, etc., in company,
a Second World War sequel for real,
altogether, now and forever.
Money
Stand up, heart, and take it.
Boat tugs at mooring.
Just a little later, a little later.
More you wanted, more you got.
The shock of recognition, like they say,
better than digitalis.
You want that sailboat sailing by?
Reach out and take it
The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley Page 9
