with foreign eyes out there the
world of all others sky and sun
sudden rain washes the window
air fresh breeze lifts the heavy
curtain to let the room out into
place the street again and people.
IN THE ROOMS
In the rooms of building James
had used in “Portrait
of a Lady” looking up to
see the frescoes and edging
of baroque seeming ornament
as down on the floor we are
still thinking amid the stacks
of old books and papers, racks,
piles, aisles of patient quiet
again in long, narrow,
pewlike seated halls for
talking sit and think of it.
HOW LONG
How long
to be here
wherever
it is—
I THINK
I think
the steps up
to the flat
parklike top
of hill by the Quirinale look
like where I’d walked when
last here had stopped
before I’d gone in
down to the Coliseum’s
huge bulk
the massed rock
and the grassed plot
where the Christians fought
and traffic roars round
as if time
only were mind
or all this
was reminiscence
and what’s real
is not.
ROOM
World’s become shrunk to
square space high ceiling
box with washed green
sides and mirror the eye
faces to looks to see the
brown haired bent head
red shirt and moving pen
top has place still apparent
whatever else is or was.
OUTSIDE
That curious arrowed sound up
from plazalike street’s below
window sun comes in through
small space in vast green drapes
opened for the air and sounds
as one small person’s piercing cry.
WALK
Walk out now as if
to the commandment
go forth or is it
come forth “Come out
with your hands up . . .”
acquiescent to each step.
WATCHING
Why didn’t I call to the
two tense people passing us
sitting at edge of plaza
whom I knew and had reason
to greet but sat watching them
go by with intent nervous faces the
rain just starting as they
went on while I sat with another
friend under large provided umbrella
finishing dregs of the coffee, watching?
VILLA CELIMONTANA
As we walk past crumbling
walls friend’s recalling his
first love an American
girl on tour who then
stays for three months in
Rome with him then off
for home and when he
finally gets himself to
New York two years or more
later they go out in
company with her friend
to some place on Broadway
where McCoy Tyner’s playing
and now half-loaded comfortable
the friend asks, “What part of
yourself do you express
when you speak English?”
Still thinking of it and me now
as well with lire circling my head.
THE STREET
All the various
members of the Italian
Parliament walking
past my lunch!
AS WITH
As with all such
the prospect of ending
gathers now friends take
leave and the afternoon
moves toward the end
of the day. So too mind
moves forward to its place
in time and now, one
says, and now—
OBJECT
The expandable enveloping flat flesh
he pulls in to center in hotel
room’s safety like taking in
the wash which had flapped
all day in the wind. In, he
measures his stomach, in like
manner his mind, inside his
persistent discretion, way,
unopened to anything by impression . . .
. . .
So often in such Romantic apprehension
he had wanted only to roam
but howsoever he weighed it or waited
whatsoever was “Rome” was home.
Life & Death
One
HISTOIRE DE FLORIDA
Histoire de Florida
You’re there
still behind
the mirror,
brother face.
Only yesterday
you were younger,
now you
look old.
Come out
while there’s still time
left
to play.
.
Waking, think of sun through
compacted tree branches,
the dense
persistent light.
Think of heaven,
home,
a heart of gold,
old song of friend’s
dear love and all
the faint world it
reaches to,
it wants.
.
Out over that piece of water
where the sound is, the place
it loops round on the map from
the frontal ocean and makes a
spit of land this sits on, here, flat,
filled with a patent detritus left
from times previous whatever
else was here before become
now brushy conclave thick with
hidden birds, nimble, small lizards.
.
Whatever, whatever.
Wherever, what-
ever, whenever— It won’t
be here anymore—
What one supposes
dead is, but what a simple ending,
pain, fear, unendurable
wrenched division, breakdown
of presumed function, truck’s broken
down again, no one left
to think of it, fix it, walk on.
Will one fly away on angel wings,
rise like a feather, lift
in the thin air— But again returned,
preoccupied, he counts his life
like cash in emptying pockets.
Somebody better help him.
.
Remember German artist
(surely “conceptual” or
“happenings”) ate himself,
cut bits from his body
on stage while audience
watched, it went well
for awhile. But then
he did something wrong
and bled to death.
The art is long
to learn, life short.
.
It must be anecdotal,
sudden sights along the so-called way,
Bunting’s advice that David Jones
when he first met him had moved but once
in adult life and then only
when the building burned down
to a place across the street.
They were having tea
when abruptly Jones got up,
went to an easel at the far end of the room
whereon a sheet of drawing paper
with, in his immaculate script, a
‘t,’
added an ‘h’ to say,
“I’ll have the ‘e’ by Monday!”
Affections flood me,
love lights light in like eyes . . .
.
Your two eyes will me
suddenly slay . . .
Such echoes
of heaven on earth
in mind as if
such a glass through which
seen darkly
such reflected truth.
What words, then,
if you love me,
what beauty
not to be sustained
will separate
finally
dancer
from dance.
.
Sun meantime
shining
just now (now) a
yellow slid
oblong
patch (light)
from wide
window
.
But don’t get physical
with me. Topper, or the Cheshire cat
whose head could appear grinning
in the tree. Could appear
in the window.
Could see
in the dark.
.
You still think
death is a subject,
or a place
in time?
Like halving the distance,
the arrow that never gets there.
I died and came back again
to the very spot I’d seemingly
left from, in a Raj-like hotel,
Calcutta, 1944. From lunch of prawns
got up and went to my room,
an hour later dimly recall was on hands and knees
crawling to quondam toilet
to vomit and shit, then must
have collapsed completely en route back
to the bed and a long time later heard
voice (hotel doctor’s, they told me)
saying, must get him to hospital,
he can’t die here. But I’d gone away
down long faint space of path
or up, or simply out,
was moving away into a reassuring distance
of somewhere
(heaven? I don’t think so—
My temperature was 96 etc.
Délires! Whatever— Wherever
had come to, gone to,
I wasn’t there.
.
Leary at Naropa for celebration
of Kerouac I remember saying, it’s dumb to die—
It’s for squares! Gregory
thought it a dumb thing to say to the young.
Was it metaphysical?
Did he mean something else.
Whether with drugs or not,
be rid of such terminal dependence?
As if, and why not,
closure were just fact
of a clogged pipe,
all coming to naught?
Get it out.
Open up?
—But the syntax would be,
“What proceeds and what follows,”
in Pound’s phrase,
like a river,
the emptying sounds
of paradise.
.
In pajamas still
late morning sun’s at my back
again through the window,
figuring mind still, figuring place
I am in, which is me,
solipsistic, a loop yet moving, moving,
with these insistent proposals
of who, where, when,
what’s out there, what’s in,
what’s the so-called art of anything,
hat, house, hand, head, heart, and so on,
quickly banal. Always reflections.
No light on the water, no clouds lifting, bird’s flap taking off—
Put the food in mouth, feel throat swallowing,
warmth is enough.
Emotions recollected in tranquillity . . .
which is what?
Feelings now are not quiet, daughter’s threatened
kidneys, sister’s metal knee replacement, son’s
vulnerable neighborhood friendships, Penelope’s social
suitors, whom I envy, envy.
Age. Age.
Locked in my mind,
my body, toes broken, skin
wrinkling up, look to the ceiling
where, through portals of skylight,
two rectangular glass boxes in the stained wood,
the yellow light comes, an outside is evident.
There is no irony, no patience.
There is nothing to wait for
that isn’t here, and it will happen.
Happiness is thus lucky.
Not I but the wind that blows through me.
.
Another day. Drove to beach,
parked the car on the edge of the road
and walked up on the wooden ramp provided,
then stopped just before the steps down to the sand
and looked out at the long edge of the surf, the sun glitter,
the backdrop of various condominiums and cottages,
the usual collective of people, cars, dogs and birds.
It was sweet to see company,
and I was included.
Yet Crusoe—
Whose mind was that, Defoe’s?
Like Kafka’s Amerika, or Tom Jones come to London.
Or Rousseau, or Odysseus—
One practices survival
much as we did when kids and would head for the woods
with whatever we could pilfer or elders gave us,
doughnuts, cookies, bread—
Even in one’s own terror,
one is proud of a securing skill.
But what so turned things
to pain, and if Mandelstam’s poem is found scratched
on cell wall in the gulag
by anonymous hand,
and that’s all of either we know—
Why isn’t that instance of the same
side of world Robinson Crusoe comes to,
footprint on sand a terror,
person finally discovered an adversary
he calls “Friday,”
who then he learns “to be good”—
But I wouldn’t, I can’t
now know or resolve
when it all became so singular,
when first that other door closed,
and the beach and the sunlight faded,
surf’s sounds grew faint, and one’s thoughts took over,
bringing one home.
.
At a dinner
in Kuala Lumpur
where I was the guest
together with a sewerage expert
had most recently worked in Saudi Arabia
where drainage was the problem,
and here it was the same,
we talked of conveniences,
shopping malls, suburbs,
and what had been hauled over
from stateside habit,
the bars and people,
while just down the street
was what the Kuala Lumpurians called
The Backside of Hell,
a short alley of small doorways
and open stalls.
They said here anything was possible.
Meantime in our hotel lobby
they had dyed some chicks a weird bluish pink
and put them in a little cage
out front for Easter.
It’s always one world
if you can get there.
.
HISTOIRE DE FLORIDA
Old persons swinging their canted metal detectors,
beach’s either end out of sight beyond the cement block highrises,
occasional cars drifting by in the lanes provided,
sheer banks of the dunes bulkheaded by bulldozers,
there a few cars
backed up, parked.
People walk by or stretch out on cots,
turning in the sun’s heat, tanning.
The line of the surf at some distance, small,
the white edge of breakers where the surfers cluster.
On the far horizon, east, is bulk of a freighter,
to the north, tower of a lighthouse across the inlet.
Back of it all the town sells the early tourists,
the stores filling with elderly consumers.
The old are gathering for an old-time ritual.
One knows that in the waters hereabouts, in a particular spring,
Ponce de Leon staggered in so as to live forever.
But poisoned with infection from a local’s arrow
and conned by the legend of eternal youth,
he’d led all his people into a bloody cul-de-sac
and ended himself being fed to alligators
ate him skin and bones, leaving no trace.
So it may be we all now look
for where the first of these old folks went down,
seeing his own face in the placid creek,
hearing the far-off murmur of the surf,
feeling his body open in the dark,
the warmth of the air, the odor of the flowers,
the eternal maiden waiting soft in her bower.
.
This is the lovely time
of late afternoon
when the sun comes in
through slatted blinds.
The large glass panes
show streaks in the dust.
Bushy laurel’s green leaves
turn golden beyond.
I hear plane pass over
high in the sky,
see flowers in vase tremble
with table’s movement.
Company’s become
room’s quiet hum.
This hanging silence
fills with sound.
.
Determined reading
keeps the mind’s attention
off other things, fills
the hole in symbolic stocking
now that Xmas approaches—
a truck through proverbial night,
the buzzes, roars, of silence
I hear here
all alone.
Poor, wee Robbie!
Flickering light in small window,
meager head and heart in hand,
I recall William Bartram
somewhere in 18th century Florida
on night not unlike this one,
after he’d hauled his skiff up on shore,
then laid down, so he wrote,
to sleep when sudden uproar,
thumpings, bangings, poundings!
all seeming very close,
awakened him to possibility
he was going to die.
But, stalwart,
checked it out
to find an alligator had clambered up
and over the gunnels of his boat
to get dead fish Bartram had left inside—
and all was finally well.
He drew great pictures of “the natives,”
looking like quaint
18th century English persons
in beguiling states of undress.
He had a heart I wish I had.
The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley Page 22
