Collected Poems

by Robert Bly

  the night frogs who give out the croak of the planet turning,

  the great knees of horses loyal to the earth risen in their will.

  “I am the dark spirit that lives in the dark.

  Each of my children is under a leaf he chose from all the leaves in the universe.

  When I was alone, for three years, alone,

  I passed under the earth through the night-water,

  I was for three days inside a warm-blooded fish.

  ‘Purity of heart is to will one thing.’

  I saw the road. . . .” “Go on! Go on!”

  “A whale bore me back home, we flew through the air. . . .

  Then I was a boy who had never seen the sea!

  It was like a King coming to his own shores.

  I feel the naked touch of the knife,

  I feel the wound,

  this joy I love is like wounds at sea. . . .”

  THE NIGHT JOURNEY IN THE COOKING POT

  I was born during the night sea-journey.

  I love the whale with his warm organ pipes

  in the mouse-killing waters,

  I love the men who drift, asleep, for three nights in octopus waters,

  the furry men gathering wood, piling the chunks by walls,

  I love the snow, I need privacy as I move,

  I am all alone, floating in the cooking pot

  on the sea, through the night I am alone.

  •

  The crow nests high in the fir.

  Birds leap through the snowy branches,

  uttering small cries,

  The mice run dragging their tails in the new-fallen snow.

  The old trees move in the wind.

  Sitting I leap from branch to branch,

  the old man calls out,

  long prayers at dawn, the deer antlers abandoned in the snow.

  •

  I float on solitude as on water . . . there is a road. . . .

  I felt the road first in New York, in that great room

  reading Rilke in the womanless loneliness.

  How marvelous the great wings, sweeping along the floor,

  inwardness, inwardness, inwardness,

  the inward path I still walk on,

  I felt the wings brushing the floors of the dark,

  trailing longer wings,

  the wing marks left in the delicate sand of the corridors,

  the face shining far inside the mountain.

  There is a certainty that makes the fingers love each other,

  and makes the body give up sleep.

  The animals open their mouths, and come, glad,

  in a ring.

  The snow begins falling.

  A winter of privacy is before us,

  winter privacy,

  the vast halls inside the heads of animals

  lie before us, the slow

  breaking of day, warm blood moving, moving,

  and immense pine trees.

  •

  For the first time in months I love the dark.

  A joy pierces into me, it arrives like a runner,

  a radio signal from inside a tree trunk,

  a smile spreads over the face, the eyes fall.

  Someone is asleep in the back of my house.

  I feel the blood galloping in the body,

  the baby whirling in the womb.

  Dark bodies pass by far out at the horizon,

  trailing lights like flying saucers,

  the shadows go by long after the bodies have passed.

  Nuns with faces smoothed by prayer

  peer out from holes in the earth.

  The mouse goes down the tunnel where the mice-infants light the whole room!

  I start down, after him,

  I see owls with blue flames coming from the tops of their heads,

  watching from firs on each side of the road,

  and snow just beginning to fall.

  They broke from the house, walked in the trees, and were lost,

  slept in the earth, brooded like wells in the deep ground,

  sleeping in anguish like grain, whole, blind in the old grave.

  Who is it that visits us from beneath the snow?

  Something shining far down in the ice.

  Deep in the mountain the sleeper is glad.

  Men with large shoulders covered with furs,

  eyes closed, inexplicable.

  Holy ones with eyes closed,

  the cracking sound in the ice under our feet,

  the frozen lake marked with caribou feet . . .

  Leaves slip down, falling through their own branches.

  The tree becomes naked and joyful.

  Leaves fall in the tomby woods.

  Some men need so little, and even that I need very little.

  Suddenly I love the dancers, leaping

  in the dark, jumping

  into the air, and the singers and dancers and leapers!

  I start to sing, and rove around the floor,

  singing like “a young Lioun.”

  I want to rise far into the piney tops.

  I am not going farther from you,

  I am coming nearer,

  green rain carries me nearer you,

  I weave drunkenly about the page,

  I love you,

  I never knew that I loved you

  until I was swallowed by the invisible,

  my black shoes evaporating, rising about my head. . . .

  For we are like the branch bent in the water . . .

  Taken out, it is whole, it was always whole. . . .

  •

  I see the road ahead,

  and my body cries out, and leaps into the air,

  and throws itself on the floor, knocking over the chairs.

  I think I am the body,

  the body rushes in and ties me up,

  and then goes through the house. . . .

  I am on the road, and the next instant in the ditch,

  face down on the earth,

  wasting energy talking to idiots.

  Clumsy wings flop around the room,

  I know what I must do,

  I am ashamed looking at the fish in the water.

  The barn doors are open. His first breath touches the manger hay

  and the King a hundred miles away

  stands up. He calls his ministers.

  “Find him.

  There cannot be two rulers in one body.”

  He sends his wise men out along the arteries,

  along the winding tunnels, into the mountains,

  to kill the child in the old moonlit villages of the brain.

  •

  The mind waters run out on the rug.

  Pull the mind in,

  pull the arm in,

  it will be taken off by a telephone post.

  Suddenly I am those who run large railroads at dusk,

  who stand around the fallen beast howling,

  who cannot get free,

  the man the lion bounding catches in the African grass.

  I stop, a hand turns over in my stomach,

  this is not the perfect freedom of the saints.

  I decide that death is friendly,

  Finally death seeps up through the tiniest capillaries of my toes.

  I fall into my own hands,

  fences break down under horses,

  cities starve, whole towns of singing women carrying to the burial

  fields the look I saw on my father’s face,

  I sit down again, I hit my own body,

  I shout at myself, I see what I have betrayed.

  What I have written is not good enough.

  Who does it help?

  I am ashamed sitting on the edge of my bed.

  WATER DRAWN UP INTO THE HEAD

  Now do you understand the men who laugh all night in their sleep?

  Here is some prose:

  Once there was a man who went to a far country

  to get his inherita
nce and then returned.

  There are places for our feet to go.

  When we come face to face with you,

  the holder laughs and is glad!

  He laughs like the mad condor in his sticky nest!

  The feminine creature at the edge of town,

  men with rifles all around.

  I am passive, listening to the lapping waves,

  I am divine, drinking the air,

  consciousness fading or sweeping out over the husky soybean

  fields like a revolving beacon all night,

  horses at the end of their tethering ropes,

  the wing of affection passes over,

  flying bulls glimpsed passing the moon disc.

  We know the world with all its visible stars,

  earth, water, air, and fire,

  but when alone we see that great tomb is not God.

  There are spirits,

  who wheel with sparks at night in a room,

  but everyone knows they are not God.

  We know of Christ, who raised the dead and started time.

  He is not God, and is not called God.

  When the waterholes go, the fish

  flop about

  in the caked mud, they can moisten each other faintly.

  That is good, but best

  is to let them lose themselves in a river.

  So rather than saying that Christ is God or he is not,

  it is better to forget all that

  and lose yourself in the curved energy.

  I entered that energy one day,

  that is why I have lived alone in old places,

  that is why I have knelt in churches, weeping,

  that is why I have become a stranger to my father.

  We have no name for you, so we say:

  he makes grass grow upon the mountains,

  and gives food to the dark cattle of the sea,

  he feeds the young ravens that call on him.

  •

  I have sat here alone for two hours. . . .

  I have sat here alone for two years!

  There is another being living inside me.

  He is looking out of my eyes.

  I hear him

  in the wind through the bare trees.

  I met the King coming through the traffic.

  He said, I shall give to you more pain than wounds at sea.

  That is why I am so glad in fall.

  I walk out, throw my arms up, and am glad.

  The thick leaves fall,

  falling past their own trunk,

  and the tree goes naked,

  leaving only the other one.

  An Extra Joyful Chorus for Those Who Have Read This Far

  I sit alone late at night.

  I sit with eyes closed, thoughts shoot through me.

  I am not floating, but fighting.

  In the marshes the mysterious mother calls to her moor-bound chicks.

  I love the Mother.

  I am an enemy of the Mother, give me my sword.

  I leap into her mouth full of seaweed.

  I am the single splinter that shoots through the stratosphere leaving fire trails!

  I walk upright, robes flapping at my heels,

  I am fleeing along the ground like a frightened beast.

  I am the ball of fire the woodman cuts out of the wolf’s stomach,

  I am the sun that floats over the Witch’s house,

  I am the horse sitting in the chestnut tree singing,

  I am the man locked inside the oakwomb,

  waiting for lightning, only let out on stormy nights.

  I am the steelhead trout that hurries to his mountain mother,

  to live again in the stream where he was born,

  gobbling up the new water.

  Sometimes when I read my own poems late at night,

  I sense myself on a long road,

  I feel the naked thing alone in the universe,

  the hairy body padding in the fields at dusk. . . .

  I have floated in the eternity of the cod heaven,

  I have felt the silver of infinite numbers brush my side—

  I am the crocodile unrolling and slashing through the mudded water,

  I am the baboon crying out as her baby falls from the tree,

  I am the light that makes the flax blossom at midnight!

  I am an angel breaking into three parts over the Ural Mountains!

  I am no one at all.

  •

  I am a thorn enduring in the dark sky,

  I am the one whom I have never met,

  I am a swift fish shooting through the troubled waters,

  I am the last inheritor crying out in deserted houses

  I am the salmon hidden in the pool on the temple floor

  I am what remains of the beloved

  I am an insect with black enamel knees hugging the curve of insanity

  I am the evening light rising from the ocean plains

  I am an eternal happiness fighting in the long reeds.

  Our faces shine with the darkness reflected from the Tigris,

  cells made by the honeybees that go on growing after death,

  a room darkened with curtains made of human hair.

  The panther rejoices in the gathering dark.

  Hands rush toward each other through miles of space.

  All the sleepers in the world join hands.

  JUMPING

  OUT

  OF

  BED

  (1973)

  All around me men are working;

  but I am stubborn, and take no part.

  The difference is this:

  I prize the breasts of the Mother.

  —Tao Te Ching

  I came out of the Mother naked,

  and I will be naked when I return.

  The Mother gave, and the Mother takes away,

  I love the Mother.

  —Old Testament, restored

  TURTLE CLIMBING FROM A ROCK

  For Wang Hui-Ming

  How shiny the turtle is, coming out

  of the water, climbing the rock, as if

  Buddha’s body were to shine!

  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.

  THINKING OF “THE AUTUMN FIELDS”

  1

  Already autumn begins here in the mossy rocks.

  The sheep bells moving from the wind are sad.

  I have left my wife foolishly in a flat country,

  I have set up my table looking over a valley.

  There are fish in the lake but I will not fish;

  I will sit silently at my table by the window.

  From whatever appears on my plate,

  I will give a little away to the birds and the grass.

  2

  How easy to see the road the liferiver takes!

  Hard to move one living thing from its own path.

  The fish adores being in the deep water;

  The bird easily finds a tree to live in.

  In the second half of life a man accepts poverty and illness;

  praise and blame belong to the glory of the first half.

  Although cold wind blows against my walking stick,

  I will never get tired of the ferns on this mountain.

  3

  Music and chanting help me overcome my faults;

  the mountains and woods keep my body fiery.

  I have two or three books only in my room.

  The sun shining off the empty bookcase warms my back.

  Going out I pick up the pinecones the wind has thrown away.


  When night comes, I will open a honeycomb.

  On the floor-throw covered with tiny red and blue flowers,

  I bring my stocking feet closer to the faint incense.

  LIKE THE NEW MOON I WILL LIVE MY LIFE

  When your privacy is beginning over,

  how beautiful the things are that you did not notice before!

  A few sweetclover plants

  along the road to Bellingham,

  culvert ends poking out of driveways,

  wooden corncribs, slowly falling,

  what no one loves, no one rushes toward or shouts about,

  what lives like the new moon,

  and the wind

  blowing against the rumps of grazing cows.

  Telephone wires stretched across water,

  a drowning sailor standing at the foot of his mother’s bed,

  grandfathers and grandsons sitting together.

  SOME NOVEMBER PRIVACY POEMS

  I am comforted

  by a crack in dry ground

  nearly smoothed over with winter dust.

  •

  How marvelous to look out and see

  the boulders

  that have been gloomy since the earth began

  now with a faint dusting of snow.

  •

  Mist: no one on the other shore.

  It may be the trees I see have consciousness

  and this desire to weep comes from them.

  •

  Most birds have gone south.