by Robert Bly
Cloths folded that murdered the great princes!
WHEN THE DUMB SPEAK
There’s a joyful night in which we lose
Everything, and drift
Like a radish
Rising and falling, and the ocean
At last throws us into the ocean;
And on the water we are sinking
As if floating on darkness.
The body raging,
And driving itself, disappearing in smoke:
Walks in large cities late at night,
Reading the Bible in Christian Science windows,
Or reading a history of Bougainville:
Then the images appear—
Images of grief,
Images of the body shaken in the grave,
And the graves filled with seawater;
Fires in the sea,
Bodies smoldering like ships,
Images of wasted life,
Life lost, imagination ruined,
The house fallen,
The gold sticks broken!
Then shall the talkative be silent
And the dumb will speak.
SLEEPERS
JOINING
HANDS
(1973)
I
SIX WINTER PRIVACY POEMS
I
About four, a few flakes.
I empty the teapot out in the snow,
Feeling shoots of joy in the new cold.
By nightfall, wind;
The curtains on the south sway softly.
II
My shack has two rooms; I use one.
The lamplight falls on my chair and table,
And I fly into one of my own poems—
I can’t tell you where—
As if I appeared where I am now,
In a wet field, snow falling.
III
More of the fathers are dying each day.
It is time for the sons.
Bits of darkness are gathering around them.
The darkness appears as flakes of light.
IV
Listening to Bach’s Cello Concerto
Inside this music there is someone
Who is not well-described
By the names of Jesus, or Jehovah, or the Lord of Hosts.
V
There is a solitude like black mud!
Sitting in the darkness singing,
I can’t tell if this joy
Is from the body, or the soul, or a third place!
VI
When I wake, new snow has fallen,
I am alone, yet someone else is with me,
Drinking coffee, looking out at the snow.
THE TURTLE
How shiny the turtle is, coming out
of the water, climbing the rock, as if
the body inside shone through!
As if swift turtle wings swept out of darkness,
crossed some barriers,
and found new eyes.
An old man falters with his stick.
Later, walkers find holes in black earth.
The snail climbs up the wet trunk glistening
like an angel-flight trailing long black banners.
No one finds the huge turtle eggs
lying inland on the floor of the old sea.
CHINESE TOMB GUARDIANS
Oh yes, I love you, book of my confessions,
Where what was swallowed, pushed away, sunken,
Driven down, begins to rise from the earth
Once more, and the madness and rage from the wells.
The buried is still buried, like cows who eat
In a collapsed strawpile all winter to get out.
Something inside me is still imprisoned in winter straw,
Or far back in the mountain where Charlemagne sleeps,
Or under the water, hard to get to, guarded by women.
Enough rises from that place to darken my poems;
Perhaps too much; and what remains down there
Makes a faint glow in the dead leaves.
I am less than half risen. I see how carefully
I have covered my tracks as I wrote,
How well I have brushed over the past with my tail.
Faces look at me from the shallow waters,
Where I have pushed them down—
Father and mother pushed into the dark.
What am I in my ambition and loneliness?
I am the dust that fills the cracks on the ocean floor.
Floating like the stingray, used to the weight
Of the ocean floor, retreating to a cave,
I live as a lizard or a winged shark,
Darting out at times to wound others, or get food.
How do we know that the hidden will ever rise?
How do we know that the buried will be revealed?
Some beings get used to life underneath.
Some dreams do not want to move into the light.
Some want to, but they can’t; they can’t make their way out,
Because someone is guarding the posts of the door.
Have you seen those Chinese tomb guardians
Left at the closed door? They stand with one knee raised;
They half-stand, half-dance, half-rage, half-shout—
Hot-tempered muscle-bulgers, big-kneed brow-bulgers.
They scowl for eternity at the half-risen.
What do you have that can get past them?
SHACK POEM
1
I don’t even know these roads I walk on,
I see the backs of white birds.
Whales rush by, their teeth ivory.
2
Far out at the edge of the heron’s wing,
where the air is disturbed by the last feather,
there is the Kingdom. . . .
3
Hurrying to brush between the Two Fish,
the wild woman flies on . . .
blue glass stones a path on earth mark her going.
4
I sit down and fold my legs. . . .
The half-dark in the room is delicious.
How marvelous to be a thought entirely surrounded by brains!
IN A MOUNTAIN CABIN IN NORWAY
I look down the mountainside. Just below my window
several grasses growing raggedly together.
The noise of the snow-fed river
winds into the ear, far back into the head.
At three a.m. the big peaks are still lit.
I look over to the other mountainside.
So many pines the eyes can’t count them!
Sparks of darkness float around me.
No one comes to visit us for a week.
A CONVERSATION
Judgment
The doctor arrives to inject the movie star against delirium tremens.
Hands that lie so often calm on the horse’s mane are shaking.
His hair hangs down like a skier’s hair after a fall.
From a whirlpool drops of black water fly up,
And thousands and thousands of years go by—
Like an infinite procession of walnut shells.
That hair that fell to the floor of the barbershop over thirty years
Lives on in some other place outlasting death.
And those shoelaces, shiny and twisted, that we tossed to the side,
Live on in their place, and the Hippopotamus horde arrives;
The newly dead kneel, and a tip of the lace sends them on into fire!
Affinity
I say the clumps of hair weep.
Because hair does not long for immense states;
Hair does not hate the poor.
Hair is merciful,
Like the arch of night under which the juvenile singer lolls back drunk.
Hair is excitable as a child of four or five;
It is a hammock on which the sleeper lies,
Dizzy with heat and the earth’s motion.
There are gol
den pins lying in bureau drawers,
Whose faces shine with power. They shine
Like the cheekbones of saints radiant in their beds,
Or their great toes that light up the whole room!
Judgment
Prince Philip becomes irritable, the royal sports car
Shoots down the narrow roads;
Judy Garland is led hysterical to the Melbourne plane.
The general joins the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
There are men who look, and cannot find the road,
And die coughing particles of black flesh onto neighboring roofs.
Nailheads that have been brooding on Burton’s Melancholy under Baltimore rowhouses
Roll out into the street under tires,
And catch the Secretary of State
As he goes off to threaten the premiers of underdeveloped nations.
So many things are borne down by the world,
By bad luck, corpses pulled down by years of death,
Veins clogged with flakes of sludge,
Mouths from which bats escape at death,
Businessmen reborn as black whales sailing under the Arctic ice.
Affinity
I say it is all right. The earth has hair cathedrals.
The priest comes down the aisle wearing caterpillar fur.
In his sermons the toad defeats the knight.
The dying man waves his son away.
He wants his daughter-in-law to come near
So that her hair will fall over his face.
The senator’s plane falls in an orchard in Massachusetts.
And there are bitter places, knots
That leave dark pits in the sawdust. . . .
The nick on the hornblade through which the mammoth escapes.
TAO TE CHING RUNNING
If we could only not be eaten by the steep teeth,
if we could only leap like the rough marble into the next world,
if the anteater that loves to rasp its tongue over the rough eggs of the lizard
could walk into a room the carpenters have just left,
or if the disturbed county commissioners could throw themselves like a waved hand up into the darkness,
if the fragments in the unconscious would grow big as the beams in hunting lodges,
then the tiny black eggs the salmon lays in the luminous ears of nuns would be visible,
then we would find holy books in our beds,
then the Tao Te Ching would coming running across the field!
CONDITION OF THE WORKING CLASSES: 1970
You United States, frightened by dreams of Guatemala,
building houses with eight-mile-long wings to imprison the Cubans,
eating a bread made of the sound of sunken buffalo bones,
drinking water turned dark by the shadow of Negroes.
You remember things seen when you were still unable to speak—
white wings lying in a field.
And when you try to pass a bill,
long boards fly up, suddenly,
in Nevada,
in ghost towns.
You wave your insubstantial food timidly in the damp air.
You long to return to the shell.
Even at the start Chicago was a place where the cobblestones
got up and flew around at night,
and anarchists fainted as they read The Decline and Fall.
The ground is soaked with water used to boil dogs.
Your sons dream they have been lost in kinky hair,
no one can find them,
neighbors walk shoulder to shoulder for three days,
but your sons are lost in the immense forest.
And the harsh deer drop,
the businessmen climb into their F-4s,
the chocks are knocked out,
the F-4 shoots off the deck,
trailing smoke,
dipping slightly,
as if haunted by the center of the ocean,
then pulling up again as Locke said it would.
Our spirit is inside the baseball rising into the light.
So the crippled ships go out into the deep,
sexual orchids fly out to meet the rain,
the singer sings from deep in his chest,
memory stops,
black threads string out in the wind,
the eyes of the nation go blind.
The building across the street suddenly explodes,
wild horses run through the long hair on the ground floor.
Cripple Creek’s survivors peer out from an upper-story window, blood pours from their ears,
the Sioux dead sleep all night in the rain troughs on the Treasury Building.
The moonlight crouches over the teenager’s body thrown from a car
The weeping child like a fish thrown from the herring block
the black-nosed Avenger leaping off the deck
Women who hear the cry of small animals in their furs
and drive their cars at a hundred miles an hour into trees
CALLING TO THE BADGER
Come, let us write of Niagara and the Huron squaws,
The Puritans with their black robes, Dillinger
Like a dark wind. Bring in the advertising men,
So that the strong-haunched woman
By the blazing stove of the sun, the moon,
May come home to us, sitting on the naked wood
In another world, and all the Shell stations folded in a faint light.
Come, let us write of the sadness of the Indian fighters,
The sadness that rises from the death of the Diggers,
From the death of Logan alone in his house,
And the Cherokees forced to eat the tail of the Great Bear.
The old are being driven to Florida
Like Geronimo, and young men are still calling to the badger
And the otter, alone on the mountains of South Dakota.
PILGRIM FISH HEADS
It is a Pilgrim village; heavy rain is falling.
Fish heads lie smiling at the corners of houses.
Inside, words like “Samson” hang from the rafters.
Outdoors the chickens squawk in woody hovels,
yet the chickens are walking on Calvinist ground.
The women move through the dark kitchen, their heavy
skirts bear them down like drowning men.
Upstairs beds are like thunderstorms on the bare floor,
leaving the covers always moist by the rough wood.
And the eggs! Strange, white, perfect eggs!
Eggs that even the rain could not move,
white, painless, with tails even in nightmares.
And the Indian, damp, musky, asking for a bed.
The Mattapoisett is in league with rotting wood,
he has made a conspiracy with the salamander,
he has made treaties with the cold heads of fishes.
In the grave he does not rot, but vanishes into water.
The Indian goes on living in the rain-soaked stumps.
This is our enemy, this is the outcast,
the one from whom we must protect our nation,
the one whose dark hair hides us from the sun.
THE TEETH MOTHER NAKED AT LAST
1
Massive engines lift beautifully from the deck.
Wings appear over the trees, wings with eight hundred rivets.
Engines burning a thousand gallons of gasoline a minute sweep over the huts with dirt floors.
The chickens feel the new fear deep in the pits of their beaks.
Buddha with Padmasambhava.
Meanwhile, out on the China Sea,
Immense gray bodies are floating,
Born in Roanoke,
The ocean on both sides expanding, “buoyed on the dense marine.”
Helicopters flutter overhead. The death-
Bee is coming. Super Sabres
Like knots of neurotic en
ergy sweep
Around and return.
This is Hamilton’s triumph.
This is the advantage of a centralized bank.
B-52s come from Guam. All the teachers
Die in flames. The hopes of Tolstoy fall asleep in the ant heap.
Do not ask for mercy.
Now the time comes to look into the past-tunnels,
The hours given and taken in school,
The scuffles in coatrooms,
Foam leaps from his nostrils,
Now we come to the scum you take from the mouths of the dead,
Now we sit beside the dying, and hold their hands, there is hardly time for goodbye.
The staff sergeant from North Carolina is dying—you hold his hand,
He knows the mansions of the dead are empty, he has an empty place
Inside him, created one night when his parents came home drunk.
He uses half his skin to cover it,
As you try to protect a balloon from sharp objects. . . .
Artillery shells explode. Napalm canisters roll end over end.
Eight hundred steel pellets fly through the vegetable walls.
The six-hour infant puts his fists instinctively to his eyes to keep out the light.
But the room explodes;
The children explode;
Blood leaps on the vegetable walls.
Yes, I know, blood leaps on the walls—
