if you can, if you must.
You talk a lot to yourself
about what you don’t want
these days, adding up figures, costs.
Here in the rented house on the water
for the proverbial two months,
it’s still not enough.
You
You will remember little of yourself
as you used to be. One expects this
familiar human convenience. I want
a more abrupt person, more explicit.
Nothing you did was lost, it was
real as you were, and are. But
this present collection of myselves
I cannot distinguish as other than
a collection. You talk to yourself
and you get the answers expected.
But oneself is real. There is, presumably,
all that is here to prove it.
Mother’s Voice
In these few years
since her death I hear
mother’s voice say
under my own, I won’t
want any more of that.
My cheekbones resonate
with her emphasis. Nothing
of not wanting only
but the distance there from
common fact of others
frightens me. I look out
at all this demanding world
and try to put it quietly back,
from me, say, thank you,
I’ve already had some
though I haven’t
and would like to
but I’ve said no, she has,
it’s not my own voice anymore.
It’s higher as hers was
and accommodates too simply
its frustrations when
I at least think I want more
and must have it.
Dreams
I was supposed to wake
but didn’t, slept
seeing the separate
heads and faces,
the arms, the legs,
the parts of a person
specific. As always
one was taken
to the end, the place
where the horror dawns
and one has killed
or been killed.
Then to wake up would be
no help in time.
The grey light breaks into
dawn. The day begins.
Outside
The light now meets
with the shuddering branch.
What I see
distorts the image.
This is an age
of slow determinations,
goes up the stairs
with dulled will.
Who would accept death
as an end
thinks he can
do what he wants to.
There
With all I know
remembering a page
clear to my eye
and in my mind
a single thing
of such size
it can find
no other place—
Written word
once so clear
blurred content
now loses detail.
The Visit
No resolution,
understanding
when she comes
abrupt, final
anger, rage
at the painful
displacement,
the brutal use
of rational love,
the meagerness
of the intentional
offering.
Versions
AFTER HARDY
Why would she come to him,
come to him,
in such disguise
to look again at him—
look again—
with vacant eyes—
and why the pain still,
the pain—
still useless to them—
as if to begin again—
again begin—
what had never been?
.
Why be
persistently
hurtful—
no truth
to tell
or wish to?
Why?
.
The weather’s still grey
and the clouds gather
where they once walked
out together,
greeted the world with
a faint happiness,
watched it die
in the same place.
Death
Once started nothing stops
but for moment
breath’s caught time
stays patient.
There Is Water
There is water
at road’s end
like a shimmer,
a golden opening,
if sun’s right
over trees
where the land
runs down
some hill
seeming to fall
to a farther reach
of earth but
no woods left
in the surrounding
wet air. Only the heavy
booming surf.
Age
He is thinking of everyone
he ever knew
in no order, lets
them come or go
as they will. He wonders
if he’ll see them again,
if they’ll remember him,
what they’ll do.
There’s no surprise now,
not the unexpected
as it had been. He’s agreed
to being more settled.
Yet, like they say, as he
gets older, he knows
he won’t expect it, not
the aches and pains.
He thinks he’ll hate it
and when he does die
at last, he supposes
he still won’t know it.
Box
Say it,
you’re afraid
but of what
you can’t locate.
You love yet
distracted fear
the body’s change,
yourself inside it.
Two
Oh Love
My love is a boat
floating
on the weather, the water.
She is a stone
at the bottom of the ocean.
She is the wind in the trees.
I hold her
in my hand
and cannot lift her,
can do nothing
without her. Oh love,
like nothing else on earth!
Wind Lifts
Wind lifts lightly
the leaves, a flower,
a black bird
hops up to the bowl
to drink. The sun
brightens the leaves, back
of them darker branches,
tree’s trunk. Night is still
far from us.
The Movie Run Backward
The words will one day come
back to you, birds returning,
the movie run backward.
Nothing so strange in its talk,
just words. The people
who wrote them are the dead ones.
This here paper talks like anything
but is only one thing,
“birds returning.”
You can “run the movie
backward” but “the movie run
backward.” The movie run backward.
Bresson’s Movies
A movie of Robert
Bresson’s showed a yacht,
at evening on the Seine,
all its lights on, watched
by two young, seemingly
poor people, on a bridge adjacent,
the classic boy and girl
of the story, any one
one cares to tell. So
years pass, of course, but
I identified with the young,
embittered Frenchman,
knew his almost complacent
anguish and the distance
he felt from his girl.
Yet another film
of Bresson’s has the
aging Lancelot with his
awkward armor standing
in a woods, of small trees,
dazed, bleeding, both he
and his horse are,
trying to get back to
the castle, itself of
no great size. It
moved me, that
life was after all
like that. You are
in love. You stand
in the woods, with
a horse, bleeding.
The story is true.
Ambition
Couldn’t guess it,
couldn’t be it—
wasn’t ever
there then. Won’t
come back, don’t
want it.
Fort Collins Remembered
To be backed
down the road
by long view
of life’s imponderable
echo of time spent
car’s blown motor
town on edge of
wherever fifty
bucks you’re lucky.
Beyond
Whether in the world below or above,
one was to come to it,
rejected, accepted, in some
specific balance. There was to be
a reckoning, a judgment
unavoidable, and one would know
at last the fact of a life lived,
objectively, divinely, as it were,
acknowledged in whatever faith.
So that looking now for where
“an ampler aether clothes the meads with roseate light,”
or simply the “pallid plains of asphodel,”
the vagueness, the question, goes in,
discovers only emptiness—as if
the place itself had been erased,
was only forever an idea and
could never be found nor had it been.
And there was nothing ever beyond.
Stone
Be as careful, as rational,
as you will but know
nothing of such kind is true
more than fits the skin
and so covers what’s within
with another soft covering
that can leave the bones alone,
that can be as it will alone,
and stays as quiet, as stable, as stone.
Elements
Sky cries down
and water looks up.
Air feels everywhere
sudden bumps, vague emptiness.
Fire burns. Earth is left
a waste, inhuman.
Still Too Young
I was talking to older
man on the phone
who’s saying something
and something are five
when I think it’s four,
and all I’d hoped for
is going up in abstract smoke,
and this call is from California
and selling a house,
in fact, two houses,
is losing me money more
than I can afford to,
and I thought I was winning
but I’m losing again
but I’m too old to do it again
and still too young to die.
Sad Advice
If it isn’t fun, don’t do it.
You’ll have to do enough that isn’t.
Such is life, like they say,
no one gets away without paying
and since you don’t get to keep it
anyhow, who needs it.
Two Kids
Two kids, small
black sculpture. In
trepidation she turns
to him who bends
forward to, as they say,
assist her. It is,
the proposal is,
her fear provokes her,
fear of a frog
crouching at the far
end of this banal, small,
heavy hunk of metal
must have cost a
pretty penny so
to arouse in mind’s
back recesses
a comfortable sense
of incest? Or else
the glass table top on which it sits
so isolates this meager action
—or else the vegetation,
the fern stalks, beside them
hang over, making privacy
a seeming thought
of these two who,
as Keats said, will never move
nor will any of it
beyond the moment,
the small minutes of some hour,
like waiting in a dentist’s office.
Wishes
FOR JOHN AND DEBORA DALEY
Lunch with its divers
orders of sliced
chicken going by on
the lazy susan with
the cucumber, the goat cheese,
the remnants of the rice
salad left from last night.
All in a whirl the participants
and their very young
children eat, and
drink, and watch for
the familial move will
betoken home ground
in the heat of sultry summer
through the wall-to-wall
glass and beyond to the oaks,
the exhilarated grass, the
fall-off to the marshy
waters, the long-legged white
birds spearing fish.
Are we not well met
here, factually nowhere
ever known to us before,
and will we not forever
now remember this? One wonders,
and hopes, loves, conjectures
as to the lives of others,
all others, from other worlds
still here and always
everywhere about us, none
to be left out. No
memory, no thought,
less. Nothing forgot.
Echoes
Step through the mirror,
faint with the old desire.
Want it again,
never mind who’s the friend.
Say yes to the wasted
empty places. The guesses
were as good as any.
No mistakes.
Summer
The last waltz
pale days
jesus freaks
empty hours
of sitting around
thinking and drinking
being home
in a rented house
for the summer only
while the folks are away
and we get to use it
so long as we pay.
If
If your hair was brown
and isn’t now,
if your hands were strong
and now you falter,
if your eyes were sharp
and now they blur,
your step confident
and now it’s careful—
you’ve had the world,
such as you got.
There’s nothing more,
there never was.
If Happiness
If happiness were
simple joy, bird,
beast or flower
were the so-called world
here everywhere
about us,
then love were as true
as air, as water—
as sky’s light, ground’s
solidness, rock’s hardness,
for us, in us,
of us.
Waiting
Were you counting the days
from now till then
to what end,
what to discover,
which wasn’t known
over and over?
Still Dancers
Set the theme
with a cadence
of love’s old
sweet song—
No harm in
the emotional
nor in remembering all
you can or want to.
Let the faint, faded music
pour forth its wonder
and bewitch whom it will,
still dancers under the moon.
The Faces
The faces with anticipated youth
look out from the current
identifications, judge or salesman,
the neighbor, the man who killed,
mattering only as the sliding world
they betoken, the time it never
mattered to accumulate, the fact that
nothing mattered but for what one
could make of it, some passing,
oblique pleasure, a pain immense
in its intensity, a sly but
insistent yearning to outwit it
all, be different, move far, far
away, avoid forever the girl
next door, whose cracked, wrinkled
smile will still persist, still know you.
To Say It
Just now at five
the light’s caught the north
side of the trees next
door, the extensive
lawn to the sea’s
edge where the marsh grass
seems a yellowish
green haze in late
afternoon. Above, the clouds
move over, storm’s edge
passes in bunches of fluffy
soft dark-centered blobs,
all going or gone
as the wind freshens
from the land, blowing out
to sea. Now by the edge
of the window glass at the level
of the floor the grass
has become particularized
in the late light, each
edge of grass stalk
a tenacious fact of being there,
not words only, but only words,
only these words, to say it.
If, as in a bottle, the message
The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley Page 10
