The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley

by Robert Creeley

  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.