The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley

by Robert Creeley

  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 unexpectedr />
  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