The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley
Page 11
has been placed, if air, water
and earth try to say so with
human agency, no matter the imperfect,
useless gesture, all that is lost,
or mistaken, the arrogance
of trying to, the light comes again,
comes here, after brief darkness is still here.
Some Echo
The ground seems almost stolid
alongside the restless water,
surface now rippled by wind
echoed by the myriad tree branches—
and thought is a patient security then,
a thing in mind at best or else
some echo of physical world
it is but can know nothing of.
Three
Such Flowers
Such flowers can bloom
blurred harsh
winter days
in house so
quietly empty.
Delight in leaves
uplifting to
cold neon or gangling
out toward faint
grey window light.
Buffalo Evening
Steady, the evening fades
up the street into sunset
over the lake. Winter sits
quiet here, snow piled
by the road, the walks stamped
down or shoveled. The kids
in the time before dinner are
playing, sliding on the old ice.
The dogs are out, walking,
and it’s soon inside again,
with the light gone. Time
to eat, to think of it all.
Winter
Snow lifts it
by slowing
the movement expected,
makes walking
slower, harder,
makes face ache,
eyes blur, hands fumble,
makes the day explicit,
the night quiet,
the outside more so
and the inside glow
with warmth, with people
if you’re lucky, if
world’s good to you,
won’t so simply
kill you, freeze you.
All the Way
Dance a little,
don’t worry.
There’s all the way
till tomorrow
from today
and yesterday.
Simple directions, direction,
to follow.
Kid
Smaller, no recall
of not liking one’s mother
given as god was
there and forever
loving learned from her
care, bemused
distraction and
much else.
Early Reading
Break heart, peace,
shy ways of holding
to the meager thing.
Little place in mind
for large, expansive counters
such as Hulme would also
seemingly deny yet afford
with bleak moon late
rising on cold night’s field.
Beside Her to Lie
He’d like the edge
of her warmth here
“beside her to lie”
in trusting comfort
no longer contests
he loves and wants her.
Circles
I took the test
and I’m not depressed.
I’m inside here,
I’ve locked the door,
become a tentative
security system,
sensory alerts, resonant
echoes, lights, long
empty hallways. Waves
crash against the breakwater.
It’s dark out there
they think until daylight
lets them off the hook
again till the phone rings,
someone passing
looks in.
On Phrase from Ginsberg’s Kaddish
“All girls grown old . . .”
broken, worn out
men, dead
houses gone, boats sunk
jobs lost, retired
to old-folks’ home.
Eat, drink,
be merry, you fink.
Worry
So careful
of anything
thought of,
so slow
to move
without it.
Coming Home
Saturday late afternoon
with evening soon coming
grey the feel of it
snow underfoot still
weather’s company
despite winter’s harshness
coming up the path
with the dogs barking
home is where the heart is
this small house stays put.
Be of Good Cheer
Go down obscurely,
seem to falter
as if walking into water
slowly. Be of good cheer
and go as if indifferent,
even if not.
There are those before you
they have told you.
Help Heaven
Help heaven up out
of nothing before it
so deep and soft
lovely it feels to
be here at all now.
She Is
Far from me
thinking
her long
warmth, close-
ness, how
her face lights,
changes, how
I miss her,
want no
more time
without
her.
Oh
Oh like a bird
falls down
out of air,
oh like a disparate
small snowflake
melts momently.
Provincetown
Could walk on water backwards
to the very place
and all around was sand
where grandma dug, bloomers up,
with her pail, for clams.
N. Truro Light—1946
Pushing it back to
night we went
swimming in the dark
at that light
house in N. Truro
with that Bill singing,
whistling on, later stuck
his head out subway train
N.Y. window, got killed on post,
smashed, he whistled
out there in the water
Beethoven’s Ninth, we
couldn’t see him, only
hear him singing on.
Rachel Had Said
FOR R. G.
Rachel had said
the persons of her life
now eighty and more
had let go themselves
into the larger life,
let go of it, them
were persons personal,
let flow so, flower,
larger, more in it,
the garden, desire,
heaven’s imagination
seen in being
here among us every-
where in open
wonder about them, in
pain, in pleasure, blessed.
Question
Water all around me
the front of sky ahead
sand off to the edges
light dazzle wind
way of where waves of
pleasure it can be here
am I dead or alive
in which is it.
Tell Story
Tell story
simply
as you know
how to.
This road
has ending,
hand
in hand.
Coda
Oh Max
1
Dumbass clunk plane “American
Airlines” (well-named) waits at gate
for hour while friend in Nevada’s
burned to ash. The rabbi
won’t be back till Sunday.
Business lumbers on
in cheapshit world of
fake commerce, buy and sell,
what today, what
tomorrow. Friend’s dead—
out of it, won’t be back
to pay phoney dues. The best
conman in country’s
gone and you’re left in
plane’s metal tube squeezed out
of people’s pockets, pennies
it’s made of, big bucks,
nickels, dimes all the same.
You won’t understand it’s forever—
one time, just one time
you get to play,
go for broke, forever, like
old-time musicians,
Thelonious, Bud Powell, Bird’s
horn with the chewed-through reed,
Jamaica Plain in the ’40s
—Izzy Ort’s, The Savoy. Hi Hat’s
now gas station. It goes fast.
Scramble it, make an omelet
out of it, for the hell of it. Eat
these sad pieces. Say it’s
paper you wrote the world on
and guy’s got gun to your head—
go on, he says, eat it . . .
You can’t take it back.
It’s gone. Max’s dead.
2
What’s memory’s
agency—why so much
matter. Better remember
all one can forever—
never, never forget.
We met in Boston,
1947, he was out of jail
and just married, lived
in sort of hotel-like
room off Washington Street,
all the lights on,
a lot of them. I never
got to know her well,
Ina, but his daughter
Rachel I can think of
now, when she was 8,
stayed with us, Placitas, wanted bicycle,
big open-faced kid, loved
Max, her father, who,
in his own fragile way,
was good to her.
In and out
of time, first Boston,
New York later—then
he showed up in N.M.,
as I was leaving, 1956,
had the rent still paid
for three weeks on
“The Rose-Covered Cottage” in Ranchos
(where sheep ambled o’er bridge)
so we stayed,
worked the street, like they say,
lived on nothing.
Fast flashes—the women
who love him, Rena, Joyce,
Max, the mensch, makes
poverty almost fun,
hangs on edge, keeps traveling.
Israel—they catch him,
he told me, lifting
a bottle of scotch at the airport,
tch, tch, let him stay
(I now think) ’cause
he wants to.
Lives on kibbutz.
So back to New Mexico,
goyims’ Israel sans the plan
save Max’s (“Kansas City,” “Terre Haute”)
New Buffalo (friend told me
he yesterday saw that on bus placard
and thought, that’s it! Max’s place).
People and people and people.
Buddy, Wuzza, Si
Perkoff, and Sascha,
Big John C., and Elaine,
the kids. Joel and Gil,
LeRoi, Cubby, back and back
to the curious end
where it bends away into
nowhere or Christmas he’s
in the army, has come home,
and father, in old South Station,
turns him in as deserter, ashamed,
ashamed of his son. Or the man
Max then kid with his papers
met nightly at Summer Street
subway entrance and on Xmas
he gives him a dime for a tip . . .
No, old man, your son
was not wrong. “America”
just a vagueness, another place,
works for nothing, gets along.
3
In air
there’s nowhere
enough not
here, nothing
left to speak
to but you’ll
know as plane
begins its
descent, like
they say, it
was the place
where you were,
Santa Fe
(holy fire) with
mountains
of blood.
4
Can’t leave, never could,
without more, just
one more
for the road.
Time to go makes
me stay—
Max, be happy,
be good, broken
brother, my man, useless
words
now
forever.
—for Max Finstein died circa 11:00 a.m.
driving truck (Harvey Mudd’s) to
California—near Las Vegas—3/17/82.
Memory Gardens
Well, while I’m here I’ll
do the work—
and what’s the Work?
To ease the pain of living.
Everything else, drunken
dumbshow.
–ALLEN GINSBERG,
“MEMORY GARDENS”
One
Heaven Knows
Seemingly never until one’s dead
is there possible measure—
but of what then or for what
other than the same plagues
attended the living with misunderstanding
and wanted a compromise as pledge
one could care for any of them
heaven knows, if that’s where one goes.
Forty
The forthright, good-natured faith
of man hung on crane up
forty stories with roof scaffolding
burning below him forty feet,
good warm face, black hair,
confidence. He said, when
the firemen appeared, he said
I’m glad to see you,
glad not to be there alone.
How old? Thirty, thirty-five?
He has friends to believe in,
those who love him.
Out
Within pitiless
indifference
things left
out.
New England
Work, Christian, work!
Love’s labors before you go
carrying lights like the
stars are all out and
tonight is the night.
Too Late
You tried to answer the questions attractively,
your name, your particular interests,
what you hoped life would prove,
what you owned and had with you,
your so-called billfold an umbilical,
useless, to the sack you’d carried
all your sad life, all your vulnerability,
but couldn’t hide, couldn’t now say,
brown hair, brown eyes, steady,
I think I love you.
Room
Quick stutters of incidental
passage going back
and forth, quick
breaks of pattern, slices
of the meat, two
rotten tomatoes, an incidental
snowstorm, death, a girl
that looks like you later
than these leaves of
grass, trees, birds, under
water, empty passage-
way, and no way back.
Hotel
; It isn’t in the world of
fragile relationships
or memories, nothing
you could have brought with you.
It’s snowing in Toronto.
It’s four-thirty, a winter evening,
and the tv looks like a faded
hailstorm. The people
you know are down the hall,
maybe, but you’re tired,
you’re alone, and that’s happy.
Give up and lie down.
Echo
Pushing out from
this insistent
time makes
all of it
empty, again
memory.
Earth
And as the world is flat or round
out over those difficult dispositions
of actual water, actual earth,
each thing invariable, specific,
I think no rock’s hardness,
call on none to gainsay me,
be only here as and forever
each and every thing is.
Dogs
I’ve trained them
to come,
to go away again,
to sit, to stand,
to wait
on command,
or I’d like to
be the master who
tells them all
they can’t do.
Vision
Think of the size of it,
so big, if you could remember
what it was or where.
Religion
Gods one would have
hauled out like props
to shore up the invented
inside-out proposals
of worlds equally like shams
back of a shabby curtain
only let in the duped,
the dumbly despairing.
So flutter the dead
back of the scene
and along with them
the possibly still living.
The Rock
Shaking hands again
from place of age,
out to the one
is walking down
the garden path