Nobody’s anything anymore. Was it Pound
who said, The way out is via the door—
Do they say that anymore—
Do I hear what I hear. Then where
are the snows of yesteryear,
the face that sank a thousand ships,
all that comforting, nostalgic stuff
we used to hear. Sitting in company
with others, I look at the backs
of my hands, see slightly mottled,
swollen flesh, hear difficultly
through many voices—see a blur.
Yet you were, you are here—
If I am a fool in love,
you’ll never leave me now.
Your
One sided
battering ramm’d
negligible asset
carnal friend—
Patience’s provision
test of time
nothing ventured
nothing gained—
In the fat doldrums
of innocent aging
I sat waiting—
Thank god you came.
Gnomic Verses
LOOP
Down the road Up the hill Into the house
Over the wall Under the bed After the fact
By the way Out of the woods Behind the times
In front of the door Between the lines Along the path
ECHO
In the way it was in the street
it was in the back it was
in the house it was in the room
it was in the dark it was
FAT FATE
Be at That this
Come as If when
Stay or Soon then
Ever happen It will
LOOK
Particular pleasures weather measures or
Dimestore delights faced with such sights.
HERE
Outstretched innocence
Implacable distance
Lend me a hand
See if it reaches
TIME
Of right Of wrong Of up Of down
Of who Of how Of when Of one
Of then Of if Of in Of out
Of feel Of friend Of it Of now
MORAL
Now the inevitable
As in tales of woe
The inexorable toll
It takes, it takes.
EAT
Head on backwards
Face front neck’s
Pivot bunched flesh
Drops jowled brunch.
TOFFEE
Little bit patted pulled
Stretched set let cool.
CASE
Whenas To for
If where From in
Past place Stated want
Gain granted Planned or
HAVE A HEART
Have heart Find head
Feel pattern Be wed
Smell water See sand
Oh boy Ain’t life grand
OH OH
Now and then
Here and there
Everywhere
On and on
WINTER
Season’s upon us
Weather alarms us
Snow riot peace
Leaves struck fist.
DUTY
Let little Linda allow litigation
Foster faith’s fantasy famously
And answer all apt allegations
Handmake Harold’s homework handsomely
GOTCHA
Passion’s particulars
Steamy hands
Unwashed warmth
One night stands
WEST ACTON SUMMER
Cat’s rats, Mother’s brother
Vacation’s patience, loud clouds
Fields far, seize trees
School’s rules, friends tend
Lawn’s form, barn’s beams
Hay’s daze, swallows follow
Sun’s sunk, moon mends
Echo’s ending, begin again
FAR
“Far be it from Harry to alter the sense of drama
inherent in the almighty tuxedo . . .”
“Far be it from Harry”
Sit next to Mary
See how the Other
Follows your Mother
PAT’S
Pat’s place
Pattern’s face
Aberrant fact
Changes that
FOUR’S
Four’s forms
Back and forth
Feel way Hindside
Paper route Final chute
SENTENCES
Indefatigably alert when hit still hurt.
Whenever he significantly alters he falters.
Wondrous weather murmured mother.
Unforgettable twist in all such synthesis.
Impeccably particular you always were.
Laboriously enfeebled he still loved people.
WORDS
Driving to the expected
Place in mind in
Place of mind in
Driving to the expected
HERE
You have to reach
Out more it’s
Farther away from
You it’s here
DATA
Exoneration’s face
Echoed distaste
Privileged repetition
Makeshift’s decision—
.
Now and then
Behind time’s
Emptied scene and
Memory’s mistakes—
.
You are here
And there too
Being but one
Of you—
SCATTER
All that’s left of coherence.
ECHO AGAIN
Statement keep talking
Train round bend over river into distance
DOOR
Everything’s before you
were here.
SUMMER ’38
Nubble’s Light a sort
of bump I thought—
a round insistent
small place
not like this—
it was a bluff,
up on the edge
of the sea.
AIR
Lift up so you’re
Floating out
Of your skin at
The edge but
Mostly up seeming
Free of the ground.
ECHOES
Think of the
Dance you could do
One legged man
Two legged woman.
THERE
Hard to be unaddressed—
Empty to reflection—
Take the road east—
Be where it is.
ECHOES
Sunrise always first—
That light—is it
Round the earth—what
Simple mindedness.
STAR
Where
It is
There
You are
.
Out there
In here
Now it is
Was also
.
Up where
It will be
And down
Again
.
No one
Point
To it
Ever
Echo
Brutish recall
seems useless now
to us all.
But my teeth you said
were yellow
have stayed nonetheless.
It was your handsomeness
went sour, your
girlish insouciance,
one said.
Was being afraid
neurotic?
Did you talk of it.
Was the high cliff jumpable.
Enough enough?
Fifty years
have passed.
I look back,
while you stand here,
see you there, still
see you there.
Thinking of Wallace Stevens
After so many years the familiar
seems even more strange, the hands
one was born with even more remote, the feet
worn to discordant abilities, face fainter.
I love, loved you, Esmeralda, darling Bill.
I liked the ambience of others, the clotted crowds.
Inside it was empty, at best a fountain in winter,
a sense of wasted, drab park, a battered nonentity.
Can I say the whole was my desire?
May I again reiterate my single purpose?
No one can know me better than myself,
whose almost ancient proximity grew soon tedious.
The joy was always to know it was the joy,
to make all acquiesce to one’s preeminent premise.
The candle flickers in the quick, shifting wind.
It reads the weather wisely in the opened window.
So it is the dullness of mind one cannot live without,
this place returned to, this place that was never left.
A Note
I interrupt these poems to bring you some lately particular information, which is that such coherence or determining purpose as I presumed myself to have in a collection such as this (not very long ago at all) seems now absent. Thus I collect much as a magpie (in Duncan’s engaging sense) all that attracts me. Be it said once again that writing is a pleasure. So I am not finally building roads or even thinking to persuade the reader of some conviction I myself hold dear. I am trying to practice an art, which has its own insistent authority and needs no other, however much it may, in fact, say. I had not really understood what the lone boy whistling in the graveyard was fact of. Now I listen more intently.
Alex’s Art
Art’s a peculiar division of labors—“a small town cat before he joined ‹the band”—
as if the whole seen world were then an echo
Of anyone’s mind in a past tense of Arabs, say,
inventing tents in the early hours of meager history.
It is “an ever fixed mark,” a parallel, “blue
suede persuasion,” a thing out there beyond
Simple industries and all those sad captains thereof.
It is a place elsewhere, time enough, “please
Pass the bacon” again, oh finite, physical person.
Listen to the wonders of how it’s been, or how it is
And will be, now as sky lifts the faint edge of morning in yellowish ‹grey tones,
as I hear nothing, as I listen again, brought into myself,
As all of it now tails back of me in flooded pockets,
as even the hum of the machine, call it, sings its persistent song—
As each so-called moment, each plunge and painful recovery
of breath echoes its precedent, its own so-called raison d’être,
Arch or meager, living or forgotten, here or finally there,
as it thinks the givens, feels around for place to put them down,
No metaphoric by-pass, no hands in pockets, no home alone,
no choice, nowhere to sit down. But what is immensely evident,
Even in each particular such as always that “where are the snows of ‹yesteryear,”
is why pay so painfully in advance for what can never be here now?
Look at it this way. You know those simple coordinates of A and B.
Add C, the comedian. Add X and Y. Add the apparent sun and simple sky.
Add everything and everyone you’ve ever known. Still empty? Still
only time enough to settle the bills, or try to, to be kind to the dog who ‹waits?
Trees’ edges defined more now as sun lifts, lifted, to higher point in far ‹off space.
I see this world as a common picture, having among others two ‹dimensions
As well as a presently pleasant odor like, say, fresh cut hay. I hear little,
given my ears are not working quite properly, and I have gone indoors
A long, long way down a tunnel to where my TV sits on a table,
and I sit before it, watching the news. All a world in mind, isn’t it,
As we do or do not get the bad guys? I don’t know. But I still can see,
and I look at you. The simple question still. Can you see me?
Dutch Boy
I’d thought
boy caught stopped
dike’s dripping water
with finger
put in hole
held it all back
oh hero
stayed steadfast
through night’s black
sat waited
till dawn’s light
when people came
repaired the leak
rescued
sad boy. But
now I see what
was the fact
he was stuck
not finger in hole was
but he could not
take it out
feared he’d be caught
be shamed
blamed
so sat
through the night
uncommonly distraught
in common fright.
Fragment
Slight you lift.
Edge skin down.
Circle seen.
Places now found.
Featured face.
Hand in when.
Disposition.
Distrust.
Three
Faint Faces
I can’t move
as formerly but
still keep
at it as the
ground cants
rising to manage
some incumbent
cloud of
reference left
years back
the tracks absent
events it
was part of
parting and
leaving still
here still there.
Time
How long for the small yellow flowers
ride up from the grasses’ bed,
seem patient in that place—
What’s seen of all I see
for all I think of it—
but cannot wait, no, cannot wait.
The afternoon, a time, floats
round my head, a boat I float on,
sit on, sat on, still rehearse.
I seem the faded register, the misplaced camera,
the stuck, forgotten box, the unread book,
the rained on paper or the cat went out for good.
Nowhere I find it now or even
stable within the givens, thus comfortable to reason,
this sitting on a case, this fact sans face.
This House
Such familiar space
out there, the window
frame’s locating
focus I could
walk holding
on to
through air from
here to there,
see it where
now fog’s close
denseness floats
the hedgerow up
off apparent ground,
the crouched, faint
trees lifting up
from it, and more
close down
there in front
by roof’s slope, down,
the Stonewall’s conjoining,
lax boulders sit,
years’ comfortable pace
unreturned, placed
by deliberation and
limit make their
sprawled edge. Here
again inside
the world one thought of,
placed in this aged box
moved here from
family site
lost as us, time’s
spinning confusions
are what
one holds on to.
Hold on, dear house,
’gainst the long hours
of emptiness, against
the wind’s tearing force.
You are my mind
made particular
my heart in its place.
The Road
Whatever was else or less
or more or even
the sinister prospect
of nothing left,
not this was anticipated,
that there would be no one
even to speak of it.
Because all had passed over
to wherever they go.
Into the fiery furnace
to be burned to ash.
Into the ground,
into mouldering skin and bone
with mind the transient guest,
with the physical again dominant
in the dead flesh under the stones.
Was this the loved hand, the
mortal “hand still capable of grasping . . .”
Who could speak
to make death listen?
One grows older,
gets closer.
It’s a long way home,
this last walking.
The Place
Afternoon it changes
and lifts, the heavy
fog’s gone and the wind
rides the field, the flowers,
to the far edge
beyond what’s seen.
It’s a dream
of something or
somewhere I’d been
or would be, a place
I had made
with you, marked out
with string
years ago. Hannah
and Will are
no longer those
children
simply defined.
Is it weather
like wind blows, and all
to the restless sea?
Personal
“Urgent” what the message says.
First of all purposes.
The loss of place for porpoises.
Less use of detergents.
Lack luster linens.
Tables without chairs.
Passionate abilities given little leeway.
They never were.
Thirties a faded time.
Forties the chaos of combat.
Fifties lots of loneliness.
Sixties redemption.
I look at you.
You look at me.
We see.
We continue.
Parade
Measure’s inherent
in the weight,
the substance itself
the person.
How far, how
long, how high,
what’s there
now and why.
Cries in the dark,
screams out,
silence,
The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley Page 20
