to be as all reunited.
Thanksgiving’s Done
All leaves gone, yellow
light with low sun,
branches edged
in sharpened outline
against far-up pale sky.
Nights with their blackness
and myriad stars, colder
now as these days go by.
Go
Push that little
thing up and the
other right down.
It’ll work.
Main and Merrimac
“It just plain
hurts to work—”
Christ holds
up hands in
mock despair
concrete bright
sun with faint
first green of
leaves this morn-
ing’s gone to
spring’s first day.
For Pen
Lady moon
light white
flowers open
in sweet silence.
For J. D.
Seeing is believing—
times such things
alter all one
had known.
These times, places,
old, echoing
clothes, hands—tools,
almost walking.
Your heart as big as all outdoors . . .
where tree grows,
gate was
waiting.
Always
Sweet sister Mary’s gone
away. Time fades on and on.
The morning was so bright, so clear
blurs in the eye, fades also.
Time tells what after all.
It’s always now, always here.
Edge
Edge of place
put on between
its proposed
place in
time
and space.
Massachusetts May
Month one was born in
particular emphasis
as year comes round
again. Laconic, diverse
sweet May of my boyhood,
as the Memorial Day Parade
marches through those memories.
Or else the hum and laze
of summer’s sweet patterns,
dragonflies, grasshoppers,
ladyslippers, and ponds—
School’s end. Summer’s song.
Memories
Hello, duck,
in yellow
cloth stuffed from
inside out,
little
pillow.
Echo
Back in time
for supper
when the lights
Two
Wall
I’ve looked at this wall
for months, bricks
faded, chipped, edge of roof
fixed with icicles
like teeth,
arch of window
opposite, blistered
white paint, a trim
of grey blue.
Specific limit—
of what? A shell
of house, no one’s home,
tenuous,
damp emptiness
under a leaky roof.
Careless of what else,
wall so close,
insistent,
to my own—
can push
with eye, thinking
where one can’t go,
those crushed
in so-called blackness,
despair. This easy
admission’s
no place walls
can echo,
real or unreal.
They sit between
inside and out—
like in school, years ago,
we saw Wall, heard
Wall say, “Thus have I,
Wall, my part discharged so;/
And, being done,
thus Wall away doth go”—
Clouds overhead, patch of
shifting blue sky. Faint sun.
I’ll Win
I’ll win the way
I always do
by being gone
when they come.
When they look, they’ll see
nothing of me
and where I am
they’ll not know.
This, I thought, is my way
and right or wrong
it’s me. Being dead, then,
I’ll have won completely.
Eats
Self-shrinking focus
mode of deployment
of people met in casual
engagement, social—
Not the man I am
or even was, have constructed
some pattern, place
will be as all.
Bored, shrink into
isolated fading
out of gross, comfortable
contact, hence out to lunch.
For the New Year
Rid forever of them and me,
the ridiculous small places
of the patient hates, the meager
agreement of unequal people—
at last all subject to
hunger, despair, a common grief.
Bookcase
One cannot offer
to emptiness
more than regret. The persons
no longer are there,
their presence become
a resonance, something
inside. Postcard—
“still more to have . . .
“of talking to you”—
found in book
in this chaos—
dead five years.
Baby Disaster
Blurred headlights of the cars out there
war of the worlds or something,
ideas of it all like dropped change,
trying to find it on the sidewalk at night.
Nothing doing anymore, grown up, moved out,
piddling little’s going to come of it,
all you put in the bank or spent
you didn’t want to, wanted to keep it all.
Walk on by, baby disaster.
Sad for us all finally, totally,
going down like in Sargasso Sea
of everything we ever thought to.
Sound
Shuddering racket of
air conditioner’s colder
than imagined winter,
standing lonely,
constancy’s not
only love’s,
not such faith
in mere faithfulness—
sullen sound.
For J. D. (2)
Pass on by, love,
wait by that garden gate.
Swing on, up
on heaven’s gate.
The confounding, confronted
pictures of world
brought to signs
of its insistent self
are here in all colors, sizes—
a heart as big as all outdoors,
a weather of spaces,
intervals between silences.
Picture
FOR D. L.
Great giggles,
chunky lumps,
packed flesh,
good nature—
like an apple,
a pear, an immaculate
strawberry, a
particular pomegranate.
And that’s the way you saw me, love?
Just so.
Was there nothing else struck you?
No.
Four for John Daley
MOTHER’S THINGS
I wanted approval,
carrying with me
things of my mother’s
beyond their use to me—
worn-out clock,
her small green lock box,
father’s engraved brass plate
for printing calling cards—
such
size of her still
calls out to me
with that silently
expressive will.
ECHO
Lonely in
no one
to hold it with—
the responsible
caring
for those one’s known.
LEAVING
My eye teared,
lump in throat—
I was going
away from here
and everything that
had come with me
first was waiting
again to be taken.
All the times
I’d looked, held,
handled that or this
reminded me
no fairness, justice,
in life, not
that can stand
with those abandoned.
BUFFALO AFTERNOON
Greyed board fence
past brown open door,
overhead weather’s
early summer’s.
The chairs sit various,
what’s left, the
emptiness, this
curious waiting to go.
I look up to eyes
of Willy’s battered
plastic horse, a dog
for its face.
All here,
even in the absence
as if all were
so placed in vacant space.
Fort William Henry/Pemaquid
Squat round stone tower
o’erlooks the quiet water.
Might in olden days here
had literally accomplished power
as they must have hauled the rocks
from the coves adjacent
to defend their rights
in this abstract place
of mind and far waters
they’d come all the way over
to where presently small son paddles,
flops on bottom in sea’s puddle.
Nothing
Ant pushes across rock face.
No sign of age there
nor in the outstretched water
looks like forever.
Dried seaweed, this ground-down sand,
or the sky where sun’s reached peak
and day moves to end—
still nothing done, enough said.
For Ted Berrigan
After, size of place
you’d filled
in suddenly emptied
world all too apparent
and as if New England
shrank, grew physically
smaller like Connecticut,
Vermont—all the little
things otherwise unattended
so made real by you,
things to do today,
left empty, waiting
sadly for no one
will come again now.
It’s all moved inside,
all that dear world
in mind for forever,
as long as one walks
and talks here,
thinking of you.
Hotel Schrieder, Heidelberg
Offed tv screen’s
reflection room
across with gauze
draped window see
silent weeping face
Marcel Marceau from
balcony seat was memory’s
Paris early fifties how
was where and when
with whom we
sat there, watching?
“Ich Bin . . .”
Ich Bin
2 Öl-tank
yellow squat
by railroad
shed train’s
zapped past
round peculiar
empty small
town’s ownership
fields’ flat
production towered
by obsolescent hill-
side memory echoing
old worn-out castle.
Après Anders
HAHA
In her hair the
moon, with
the moon, wakes water—
balloon hauls her
into the blue. She
fängt, she
in the woods
faints, finds, fakes
fire, high in
Erlen, oil, Earl—
like a Luftschiffern,
tails of high clouds up
there, one says.
KAPUT KASPER’S LATE LOVE
I was
“kaput Kasper”
in Fensterfrost,
window shade auntie,
mother’s faltering bundle.
Blood flecks on some
wind flint horizon.
I knew my swollen loaf,
Lauf, like, out, aus
es floats, it flötete.
Sie sagte, said
the night stuck
two eyes in her heart (head).
I griff, grabbed, griped,
in the empty holes, held
on to holes
unter der Stirn,
under stars, the stars
in the sky tonight.
DEN ALTEN
Then to old Uncle Emil
den du immer mimst
you always
missed,
missed most,
häng einem alten Haus
in fear, hung
from a rafter, a
beam old
Uncle Emil you
immer mimst
over the logical river
Fluss in the
truly really
feuchten clay, fucked finished clay.
LATE LOVE
Stuck in her stone hut
he fights to get the window up.
Her loopy Dachshunds
have made off with the pupils
of his eyes, like, or else
now from summit to summit
of whatever mountains against which
he thinks he hears the stars crash,
sounds truly nada
in all the sad façade.
AGAIN
The woman who
came out of the shadow
of the trees asked
after a time “what time is it”
her face
for a second
in my head
was there again
and I felt again
as against this emptiness
where also
I’d been.
Waiting
Waiting for the object,
the abject adjunct—
the loss of feel here,
field, faded.
Singing inside,
outside grey, wet,
cold out. The weather
doesn’t know it,
goes only on to
wherever.
Hands
Reaching out to shake,
take, the hand,
hands, take in
hand hands.
Three
“ . . . come, poppy, when will you bloom?”
– CHARLES OLSON
Fathers
Scattered, aslant
faded faces a column
a rise of the packed
peculiar place to a
modest height makes
a view of common lots
in winter then, a ground
of battered snow crusted
at the edges under
it all, there under
my fathers their
faded women, friends,
the family all echoed,
names trees more tangible
physical place more tangible
the air of this place the road
going past to Watertown
or down to my mother’s
grave, my father’s grave, not
now this resonance of
each other one was his, his
survival only, his curious
reticence, his
dead state,
his emptiness, his acerbic
edge cuts the hands to
hold him, hold on, wants
the ground, wants this frozen ground.
Memory Gardens
Had gone up to
down or across dis-
placed eagerly
unwitting hoped for
mother’s place in time
for supper just
to say anything
to her again one
simple clarity her
unstuck glued
deadness emptied
into vagueness hair
remembered wisp that
smile like half
her eyes brown eyes
her thinning arms
could lift her
in my arms so
hold to her so
take her in my arms.
Flicker
In this life the
half moment
ago is just
at this edge
of curious place you
reach for feel
that instant shining
even still wet’s
gone faded flashlight.
My Own Stuff
“My own stuff” a
flotsam I could
neither touch quite
nor get hold of, fluff,
as with feathers, milk-
weed, the evasive
lightness distracted yet
insistent to touch
it kept poking, trying
with my stiffened
fingers to get hold of
its substance I had
even made to be
there its only
reality my own.
Window
The upper part is snow,
white, lower, grey
to brown, a thicket,
lacing, light seeming
hedge of branches, twigs,
growths of a tree, trees,
see eyes, holes, through
the interlacings, the white
emphatic spaced places
of the snow, the gravity,
weight, holds it, on top,
as down under, the grey,
brown, edged red, or
ground it has to come to,
must all come down.
Winter Morning
The sky’s like a pewter
of curiously dulled blue,
The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley Page 12
