The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley

by Robert Creeley

  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.