The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley

by Robert Creeley

  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,