on this abstracting page. Can I use the green,
when you’re done? What’s that supposed to be,
says someone. All the kids crowd closer
in what had been an empty room
where one was trying at least
to take a nap, stay quiet, to think
of nothing but oneself.
.
Back into the cave, folks,
and this time we’ll get it right?
Or, uncollectively perhaps, it was
a dark and stormy night he
slipped away from the group, got
his mojo working and before
you know it had that there
bison fast on the wall of the outcrop.
I like to think they thought,
though they seemingly didn’t, at least
of something, like, where did X put the bones,
what’s going to happen next, did she, he or it
really love me? Maybe that’s what dogs are for,
but there’s no material surviving
pointing to dogs as anyone’s best friend, alas.
Still here we are no matter, still hacking away,
slaughtering what we can find to, leaving
far bigger footprints than any old mastodon.
You think it’s funny? To have prospect
of being last creature on earth or at best a
company of rats and cockroaches?
You must have a good sense of humor!
Anyhow, have you noticed how everything’s
retro these days? Like, something’s been here before—
or at least that’s the story. I think one picture is worth
a thousand words and I know one cave fits all sizes.
.
Much like a fading off airplane’s
motor or the sound of the freeway
at a distance, it was all here clearly enough
and no one goes lightly into a cave,
even to hide. But to make such things
on the wall, against such obvious
limits, to work in intermittent dark,
flickering light not even held steadily,
all those insistent difficulties.
They weren’t paid to, not that we know of,
and no one seems to have forced them.
There’s a company there, tracks
of all kinds of people, old folks
and kids included. Were they having
a picnic? But so far in it’s hardly
a casual occasion, flat on back with
the tools of the trade necessarily
close at hand. Try lying in the dark
on the floor of your bedroom and roll
so as you go under the bed and
ask someone to turn off the light.
Then stay there, until someone else comes.
Or paint up under on the mattress the last
thing you remember, dog’s snarling visage
as it almost got you, or just what you do
think of as the minutes pass.
.
Hauling oneself through invidious
strictures of passage, the height
of the entrance, the long twisting
cramped passage, mind flickers, a lamp
lit flickers, lets image project
what it can, what it will, see there
war as wanting, see life as a river,
see trees as forest, family as
others, see a moment’s respite,
hear the hidden bird’s song, goes
along, goes along constricted, self-
hating, imploded, drags forward
in imagination of more, has no
time, has hatred, terror, power.
No light at the end of the tunnel.
.
The guide speaks of music, the
stalactites, stalagmites making a
possible xylophone, and some
Saturday night-like hoedown
businesses, what, every three
to four thousand years? One
looks and looks and time
is the variable, the determined
as ever river, lost on the way,
drifted on, laps and continues.
The residuum is finally silence,
internal, one’s own mind constricted
to focus like any old camera
fixed in its function.
Like all good questions,
this one seems without answer,
leaves the so-called human
behind. It makes its own way
and takes what it’s found
as its own and moves on.
.
It’s time to go to bed
again, shut the light off,
settle down, straighten
the pillow and try to sleep.
Tomorrow’s another day
and that was all thousands
and thousands of years ago,
myriad generations, even
the stones must seem changed.
The gaps in time,
the times one can’t account for,
the practice it all took
even to make such images,
the meanings still unclear
though one recognizes
the subject, something has
to be missed, overlooked.
No one simply turns on a light.
Oneself becomes image.
The echo’s got in front,
begins again what’s over
just at the moment it was done.
No one can catch up, find
some place he’s never been to
with friends he never had.
This is where it connects,
not meaning anything one
can know. This is where
one goes in and that’s what’s to find
beyond any thought or habit,
an arched, dark space, the rock,
and what survives of what’s left.
Absence
Sun on the edges of leaves,
patterns of absent pleasure,
all that it meant
now gathered together.
Days all was away
and the clouds were far off
and the sky was heaven itself,
one wanted to stay
alone forever perhaps
where no one was,
and here again it is
still where it was.
The Ball
Room for one and all
around the gathering ball,
to hold the sacred thread,
to hold and wind and pull.
Sit in the common term.
All hands now move as one.
The work continues on.
The task is never done.
Which Way
Which one are you
and who would know.
Which way
would you have come this way.
And what’s behind,
beside, before.
If there are more,
why are there more.
On Earth
One’s here
and there is still elsewhere
along some road to hell
where all is well—
or heaven
even
where all the saints still wait
and guard the golden gate.
Saying Something
If, as one says, one says
something to another,
does it go on and on then
without apparent end?
Or does it only become talk,
balked by occasion, stopped
because it never got started,
was said to no one?
The Red Flower
What one thinks to hold
Is what one thinks to know,
So comes of simple hope
And leads one on.
The o
thers there the same
With no one then to blame
These flowered circles handed.
So each in turn was bonded.
There the yellow bees will buzz,
And eyes and ears appear
As listening, witnessing hearts
Of each who enters here.
Yet eyes were closed—
As if the inside world one chose
To live in only as one knows.
No thing comes otherwise.
Walk on, on crippled leg,
Because one stumped with cane,
Turned in and upside down
As with all else, bore useless weight.
The way from here is there
And back again, from birth to death,
From egg to echo, flesh to eyeless skull.
One only sleeps to breathe.
The hook, the heart, the body
Deep within its dress, the folds of feelings,
Face to face to face, no bandaged simple place,
No wonder more than this, none less.
The Puzzle
Insoluble.
Neither one nor the other.
A wall.
An undulating water.
A weather.
A point in space.
Waste of time.
Something missed.
The faces.
Trees.
The unicorn
with its horn.
Able
as ready.
Fixed on heart
on head’s prerogative.
Which way to go
up down
backward
forward.
In the sky
stars flash by.
Boats
head for heaven.
Down below
the pole
thrusts up
into the diamond.
Found, fills
its echo.
A baby.
Sound.
A Full Cup
Age knows little other than its own complaints.
Times past are not to be recovered ever.
The old man and woman are left to themselves.
When I was young, there seemed little time.
I hurried from day to day as if pursued.
Each thing I discovered, another came to possess me.
Love I could ask no questions of, it was nothing
I ever anticipated, ever thought would be mine.
Even now I wonder if it will escape me.
What I did, I did finally because I had to,
whether from need of my own or that of others.
It is finally impossible to live and work only for pay.
I do not know where I’ve come from or where I am going.
Life is like a river, a river without beginning or end.
It’s been my company all my life, its wetness, its insistent movement.
The only wisdom I have is what someone must have told me,
neither to take nor to give more than can be simply managed.
A full cup carried from the well.
Old Story
FROM THE DIARY OF FRANCIS KILVERT
One bell wouldn’t ring loud enough.
So they beat the bell to hell, Max,
with an axe, show it who’s boss,
boss. Me, I dreamt I dwelt in
some place one could relax
but I was wrong, wrong, wrong.
You got a song, man, sing it.
You got a bell, man, ring it.
Later (Wrightsville Beach)
Crusoe again, confounded, confounding purposes,
cruising, looking around for edges of the familiar,
the places he was in back then,
wherever, all the old sand and water.
How much he thought to be there he can’t remember.
Shipwreck wasn’t thinkable at least until
after it happened, and then he began at the edge,
the beach, going forward, backward, until he found place again.
Even years slipped past in the background.
The water, waves, sand, backdrop of the houses,
all changed now by the locals, the tourists,
whoever got there first and what they could make of it.
But his story is real too, the footprint, the displacement
when for the first time another is there, not just imagined,
and won’t necessarily agree with anything, won’t go away.
Dover Beach (Again)
The waves keep at it,
Arnold’s Aegean Sophocles heard,
the swell and ebb,
the cresting and the falling under,
each one particular and the same—
Each day a reminder, each sun in its world, each face,
each word something one hears
or someone once heard.
Echo
Walking, the way it used to be,
talking, thinking—being in,
on the way—days after anything
went or came, with no one,
someone, having or not having a way.
What’s a life if you look at it,
what’s a hat if it doesn’t fit.
Wish
I am
transformed into a clam.
I will
be very, very still.
So natural be,
and never ‘me’
alone so far from home
a stone
would end it all
but for this tall
enduring tree,
the sea,
the sky
and I.
Here
Up a hill and down again.
Around and in—
Out was what it was all about
but now it’s done.
At the end was the beginning,
just like it said or someone did.
Keep looking, keep looking,
keep looking.
TO MY/LITTLE:
PEN’S
VALENTINE
To My
Little
Dear
Yo
Wh
Fr
Do better
To
Where
From
Dear (begin again)
Yo(u)
W(ere my)
Fr(iend)
To My
Little To
My
Love
Valentine for You
Wherefrom, whereto
the thought to do—
Wherewith, whereby
the means themselves now lie—
Wherefor, wherein
such hopes of reconciling heaven—
Even the way is changed
without you, even the day.
Unpublished Poems
Poets
Friend I had in college told
me he had seen as kid out the
window in backyard of an
apartment in upscale Phila-
delphia the elder Yeats walking
and wondered if perhaps he
was composing a poem or else
in some way significantly thinking.
So later he described it, then
living in a pleasant yellowish
house off Harvard Square,
having rooms there, where,
visiting I recall quick sight of
John Berryman who had been
his teacher and was just leaving
as I’d come in, on a landing of
the stairs I’d just come up, the
only time and place I ever did.
Jumping with Jackson
Can’t say much
Of age and such,
Just it’s fun to breathe
And take one’s ease
With a friend like you
Who keeps it true
To life and what
We cam
e here for and got.
Harvey’s Hip
Beauty’s in eye of the proverbial beholder,
but when you’re older,
you get bolder.
Harvey says, “Hold still, bro, so I can get you,
let me look hard at you, stare at you, see what you
never thought I’d know how to.”
It all fits in his impeccable scheme
like dreams find room for one and all, it seems,
and “inside out” is what it always comes to mean.
Harvey knows—from the hair on your head
to the bottoms of your shoes, to what you do in bed—
even who you were talking to and what they said.
Alice
Happiness is its own reward,
not bought or sold,
not earned or even thought of.
Pleasure’s its echo,
sudden burst of sun,
the weather changing everything
when mind can’t follow
after all it was fact of,
what’s then left of feeling.
Your name Alice says that you are noble,
hold true— but wonder for me is all you are and do,
all of you
Credits
The following texts included in this volume were originally published as follows:
“Preface: Old Poetry.” In So There:
Poems 1976–1983. New York:
New Directions, 1998. Copyright
© Robert Creeley. Reprinted by
permission of New Directions
Publishing Corp.
Hello: A Journal, February 29–May 3,
1976. New York: New Directions,
1978. Reprinted in So There.
Later. New York: New Directions, 1979.
Reprinted in So There.
Mirrors. New York: New Directions,
1983. Reprinted in So There.
Memory Gardens. New York: New
Directions, 1986. Reprinted in
Just in Time: Poems 1984–1994.
(New York: New Directions, 2001).
Windows. New York: New Directions,
1990. Reprinted in Just in Time.
Echoes. New York: New Directions,
1994. Reprinted in Just in Time.
Life & Death. New York: New
Directions, 1998.
If I were writing this. New York: New
Directions, 2003.
On Earth. Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 2006.
Epigraphs appear here by permission as follows:
The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley Page 31
