and “My heart’s in the highlands . . . ,”
feels the day beginning again.
And whatever, whatever, says it
again, and stays here, stays
here with its old hands,
holds on with its stiff, old fingers,
can come too, like they say,
can come with me into this patient weather,
and won’t be left alone, no, never alone ever again,
in whatever time’s left for us here.
Questions
In the photograph you felt
grey, disregarded, your head
obscured by the company
around you, presuming
some awkward question. Were you dead?
Could this self-indulgence extend
to all these others, even
persuade them to do something
about you, or with you, given
they had their own things to do?
Lovers
Remember? as kids
we’d looked in crypt
had we fucked? we
walked a Saturday
in cemetery it
was free the flowers
the lanes we looked
in past the small
barred window into
dark of tomb when
it looked out at us
face we saw white
looking out at us
inside the small
room was it man
who worked there? dead
person’s fraught skull?
Funeral
Why was grandma
stacked in sitting room
so’s people could come
in, tramp through.
What did we eat
that day before
we all drove off
to the cemetery in Natick
to bury her with grandpa
back where the small air-
port plane flew over
their modest lot there
where us kids could
look through the bushes,
see plane flying around or
sitting on the ground.
Supper
Time’s more than
twilight mother at
the kitchen table over
meal the boiled potatoes
Theresa’s cooked with meat.
Classical
One sits vague in this sullenness.
Faint, greying winter, hill
with its agéd, incremental institution,
all a seeming dullness of enclosure
above the flat lake—oh youth,
oh cardboard cheerios of time,
oh helpless, hopeless faith of empty trust,
apostrophes of leaden aptitude, my simple children,
why not anger, an argument, a proposal,
why the use simply of all you are or might be
by whatever comes along, your persons
fixed, hung, splayed carcasses, on abstract rack?
One instant everything must always change,
your life or death, your articulate fingers lost
in meat time, head overloaded, fused circuit,
all cheap tears, regrets, permissions forever utterly forgot.
Mother’s Photograph
Could you see present
sad investment of
person, its clothes,
gloves and hat,
as against yourself
backed to huge pine tree,
lunch box in hand in
homemade dress aged
ten, to go to school
and learn to be somebody,
find the way will
get you out of the
small place of home
and bring them with
you, out of it too,
sit them down in a new house.
Valentine
Had you a dress
would cover you all
in beautiful echoes
of all the flowers I know,
could you come back again,
bones and all,
just to talk
in whatever sound,
like letters spelling words,
this one says, Mother,
I love you—
that one, my son.
Lecture
What was to talk to,
around in half-circle,
the tiers, ledges
of their persons
attending expectation,
something’s to happen,
waiting for words,
explanations—
thought of cigarette
smoke, a puff recollected,
father’s odor
in bed years ago.
Back
Suppose it all turns into, again,
just the common, the expected
people, and places, the distance
only some change and possibly one
or two among them all, gone—
that word again—or simply more
alone than either had been
when you’d first met them. But you
also are not the same,
as if whatever you were were
the memory only, your hair, say,
a style otherwise, eyes now
with glasses, clothes even
a few years can make look
out of place, or where you
live now, the phone, all of it
changed. Do you simply give
them your address? Who?
What’s the face in the mirror then.
Who are you calling.
Knock Knock
Say nothing
to it.
Push it away.
Don’t answer.
Be grey,
oblique presence.
Be nothing
there.
If it speaks
to you, it
only wants
you for itself
and it has
more than you,
much
more.
Heavy
Friend’s story of dead whale on California beach
which the people blow up to get rid of and for weeks
after they’re wiping the putrescent meat off their feet,
like, and if that’s a heavy one, consider Meese
and what it takes to get rid of mice
and lice and just the nice people next door, oh yeah . . .
Skin and Bones
It ain’t no sin
to sit down
take off your coat
wait for whatever
happens here
whenever it happens
for whatever.
It’s your own skin.
The Doctor
Face of my
father looks out
from magazine’s
page on back
of horse at eight
already four
more than
I was when
the doctor died
as both
mother and Theresa
used to say, “the
doctor,” whose
saddened son I
was and have
to be, my sister
older speaks of
him, “He felt
that with Bob
he was starting
over, perhaps, and
resolved not
to lose this son
as he had Tom and Phil . . .”
Nothing said
to me, no words more
than echoes, a
smell I remember
of cigarette box, a
highball glass,
man in bed with
mother, the voice
lost now. “Your
father was such
a Christmas fellow!”
So happy, empty
in the leftover
remnants
of whatever
it was, the doctor’s
house, the doctor’s family.
Lost
One could reach up into
the air, to see if it was
still there, shoved back
through the hole, the little
purpose, hidden it was,
the small, persisting agencies,
arms and legs, the ears
of wonder covered with area,
all eyes, the echoes, the aches
and pains of patience, the
inimitable here and now of all,
ever again to be one and only one,
to look back to see the long distance
or to go forward, having only lost.
Old
Its fears are
particular, head,
hands, feet, the
toes in two
patient rows,
and what comes
now is less,
least of all it
knows, wants in
any way to know.
There
On such a day
did it happen
by happy coincidence
just here.
Language
Are all your
preoccupations un-
civil, insistent
caviling, mis-
taken dis-
criminating?
Days
FOR H. H. C.
In that strange light,
garish like wet blood,
I had no expectations
or hopes, nothing any more
one shouts at life to wake it up,
be nice to us—simply scared
you’d be hurt, were already
changed. I was, your head
out, looked—I want each
day for you, each single day
for you, give them
as I can to you.
Heavenly Hannah
Oh Hannie
help me
help
Four
A Calendar
THE DOOR
Hard to begin
always again and again,
open that door
on yet another year
faces two ways
but goes only one.
Promises, promises . . .
What stays true to us
or to the other
here waits for us.
(January)
HEARTS
No end to it if
“heart to heart”
is all there is
to buffer, put against
harshness of this weather,
small month’s meagerness—
“Hearts are trumps,”
win out again
against all odds,
beat this
drab season of bitter cold
to save a world.
(February)
MARCH MOON
Already night and day move
more closely, shyly, under this frozen
white cover, still rigid with
locked, fixed, deadened containment.
The dog lies snuffling, snarling
at the sounds beyond the door.
She hears the night, the new moon,
the white, wan stars, the
emptiness momently will break
itself open, howling, intemperate.
(March)
“WHAN THAT APRILLE . . .”
“When April with his showers sweet
the drought of March has pierced to the root
and bathed every vein in such liqueur
its virtue thus becomes the flower . . .”
When faded harshness moves to be
gone with such bleakness days had been,
sunk under snows had covered them,
week after week no sun to see,
then restlessness resolves in rain
after rain comes now to wash all clean
and soften buds begin to spring
from battered branches, patient earth.
Then into all comes life again,
which times before had one thought dead,
and all is outside, nothing in—
and so it once more does begin.
(April)
WYATT’S MAY
In May my welth and eke my liff, I say,
have stonde so oft in such perplexitie . . .
–SIR THOS. WYATT
In England May’s mercy
is generous. The mustard
covers fields in broad swaths,
the hedges are white flowered—
but it is meager, so said.
Having tea here, by the river,
huge castle, cathedral, time
passes by in undigested,
fond lumps. Wyatt died
while visiting friends nearby,
and is buried in Sherborne Abbey
“England’s first sonnet-maker . . .”
May May reward him and all
he stood for more happily now
because he sang May,
maybe for all of us:
“Arise, I say, do May some obseruance!
Let me in bed lie dreming in mischaunce . . .”
So does May’s mind remember all
it thought of once.
(May)
SUMMER NIGHTS
Up over the edge of
the hill climbs the
bloody moon and
now it lifts the far
river to its old familiar
tune and the hazy
dreamlike field—and all
is summer quiet, summer
nights’ light airy shadow.
(June)
“BY THE RUDE BRIDGE . . .”
Crazy wheel of days
in the heat, the revolution
spaced to summer’s
insistence. That sweat,
the dust, time earlier they
must have walked, run,
all the way from Lexington
to Concord: “By the rude
bridge that arched the flood . . .”
By that enfolding small river
wanders along by grasses’
marge, by thoughtless stones.
(July)
VACATION’S END
Opened door chinks
let sun’s restlessness
inside eighth month
going down now
earlier as day begins
later, time running down,
air shifts to edge
of summer’s end
and here they’ve gone,
beach emptying
to birds, clouds,
flash of fish, tidal
waters waiting, shifting,
ripple in slight wind.
(August)
HELEN’S HOUSE
Early morning far trees lift
through mist in faint outline
under sun’s first rose,
dawn’s opalescence here,
fall’s fading rush to color,
chill under the soft air.
Foreground’s the planted small fruit trees,
cut lawn, the firs, as now
on tall dying tree beyond
bird suddenly sits on sticklike branch.
Walk off into this weather?
Meld finally in such air?
See goldenrod, marigold, yarrow, tansy
wait for their turn.
(September)
OLD DAYS
River’s old look
from summers ago
we’d come to swim
now yellow, yellow
rustling, flickering
leaves in sun
middle of October
water’s up, high sky’s blue,
bank’s mud’s moved,
edge is
closer,
nearer than then.
(October)
THE TALLY
&
nbsp; Sitting at table
wedged back against wall,
the food goes down in
lumps swallowed
in hunger, in
peculiar friendship
meets rightly again
without reason
more than common bond, the children
or the old cannot reach
for more
for themselves.
We’ll wonder,
wander, in November,
count days and ways
to remember, keep away
from the tally,
the accounting.
(November)
MEMORY
I’d wanted
ease of year,
light in the darkness,
end of fears.
For the babe newborn
was my belief,
in the manger,
in that simple barn.
So since childhood
animals
brought back kindness,
made possible care.
But this world now
with its want, its pain,
its tyrannic confusions
and hopelessness,
sees no star
far shining,
no wonder as light
in the night.
Only us then
remember, discover,
still can care for
the human.
(December)
Windows
One
THE COMPANY
Song
What’s in the body you’ve forgotten
and that you’ve left alone
and that you don’t want—
or what’s in the body that you want
and would die for—
and think it’s all of it—
if life’s a form to be forgotten
once you’ve gone and no regrets,
no one left in what you were—
That empty place is all there is,
and/if the face’s remembered,
or dog barks, cat’s to be fed.
I Would Have Known You Anywhere
Back of the head, hand, the hair
no longer there, blown, the impotence
of face, the place no longer there, known
you were going to be there—
You were a character of dream,
a mirror looking out, a way
of seeing into space, an
impotent emptiness I share—
This day we spoke as number,
week, or time, this place an
absent ground, a house remembered
then no place. It’s gone, it’s gone.
The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley Page 13
