by Robert Bly
Grass heels over in the wind.
The feminine hooves of the horse
stand side by side as he eats.
ON A MOONLIT ROAD IN THE NORTH WOODS
I sit on the forest road,
cross-legged.
I am an oyster
breathing on his own shore.
•
Cars seldom use this road.
I looked up and down,
no car coming, none would,
perhaps for hours. . . .
•
All day my thoughts ran on in small rivulets
near some bigger flood.
Several times water
carried me away:
then I was a cedar twig,
a fish scale. . . .
•
And what does the oyster think
on this forest road?
He thinks of his earlier life,
of meeting her again.
THE WALNUT TREE ORCHARDS
(An answering poem in which Wang Wei writes the first poem, then his friend P’ei Ti writes a poem answering it.)
WANG WEI:In the old days the serious man was not an “important person.”
He thought making decisions was too complicated for him.
He took whatever small job came along.
Essentially he did nothing, like these walnut trees.
P’EI TI:I soon found doing nothing was a great joy to me.
Look, you see, here I am! Keeping my ancient promise.
Let’s spend today just strolling around these walnut trees.
The two of us will nourish the ecstasies Chuang Tzu loved.
THE HILL OF HUA-TZU
WANG WEI:The birds fly away into the air that never ends;
the magnificence of fall comes back to the mountain.
Whenever I walk up or down Hua-Tzu hill,
my whole body feels confusion and inner suffering.
P’EI TI:The sun goes down; there is wind sound in the pines.
Walking home I notice dew on the grass.
The white clouds look up at me from the tracks of my shoes.
The blue from the mountain touches my clothes.
CHRYSANTHEMUMS
(planted for Tao Yuan Ming, who likes them)
1
Tonight I rode again in the moonlight!
I saddled late at night.
The horse picked his way down a dead-furrow,
guided by the deep shadows.
2
A mile from the yard the horse rears,
glad. How magnificent to be doing nothing,
moving aimlessly through a nighttime field,
and the body alive, like a plant!
3
Coming back up the pale driveway,
how calm the wash looked on the line!
And when I entered my study, beside the door,
white chrysanthemums in the moonlight!
AFTER LONG BUSYNESS
I start out for a walk at last after weeks at the desk.
Moon gone, plowing underfoot, no stars; not a trace of light!
Suppose a horse were galloping toward me in the open field?
Every day I did not spend in solitude was wasted.
SOME IMAGES FOR DEATH
Death throws a shadow on us, as if it were a tree.
It is a swinging lamp, swaying from the motion of the planet.
It rushes up through tunnels where only chill air rushes.
The mammoths feel the wind in their hollow legs.
The leaves above us rustle.
A NIGHT IN DECEMBER
On this windy December night two children lost their way.
“Birds ate the womb-shaped seeds we dropped in the moonlight.”
(“You know we left so early the moon was still out.”)
“Come in, do not be frightened, children.”
How odd that I feel a connection between the feminine
And this windy December night! Or is it the feminine?
When Paris took Helen away, he kept the moon in a pouch.
Inside the salmon’s stomach, the cook finds the wedding ring.
“Come in, do not be frightened, children!”
Why do men need this fear? Some are torn in pieces,
Other men lengthen out years on islands. . . .
This night calls: men will die for this night.
SLEEPING FACES
Tonight the first fall rain washes away my sly distance.
I have decided to blame no one for my life.
This water falls like a great privacy.
Letters sink into the desk,
The desk sinks away, leaving an intelligence
Slowly learning to talk of its own suffering.
The muttering of thunder is a gift
That reverberates in the roof of the mouth.
Another gift is a child’s face in a dark room
I see as I check the house during the storm.
My life is a blessing, a triumph, a car racing through the rain.
THE CREEK BY THE LUAN HOUSE
WANG WEI:Autumn rain and sudden winds.
The water plunges, bouncing off the rocks.
Waves leap aimlessly over each other.
The white heron is alarmed and lands.
P’EI TI:A man could hear the water-sound far off.
I walk down looking for the ford.
Ducks and egrets swim away, and then
veer back, longing to be near people.
THE MAGNOLIA GROVE
For Michael Bullock
WANG WEI:The mountain receives the last sunshine of fall.
Flocks fly off following the first that leaves.
Occasionally something emerald flashes in the trees.
The evening dark has nowhere to settle down.
P’EI TI:Settling down at dusk from the dome of light
bird voices get mingled with the river sounds.
The path beside the river winds off into the distance.
Joy of solitude, will you ever come to an end?
ANOTHER DOING NOTHING POEM
There is a bird that flies through the water.
It is like a whale ten miles high!
Before it went into the ocean,
it was just a bit of dust from under my bed!
WALKING IN THE DITCH GRASS
The spring wind blows dissatisfactions
and mad architects, two-mile-long tails,
and my shoes like whales
eat the grass, they sweep through
the grass, eating
up the darkness.
The night is windy. Sleek cows fly
across the sky. Samson
is angry.
So much of women
in this uneven grass.
TONGUES WHIRLING
You open your mouth, I put my tongue in,
and this wild universe-thing begins!
Our tongues together are two seagulls
whirling high above the Great Lakes,
two jellyfish floating under a Norwegian moon!
Suddenly we are with the fallen leaves,
blowing along the soaked roads.
My hand closes so firmly around you
and I feel the sea rising
and falling
as we go ashore . . .
We are two turtles with wings!
We are rolling together, head down,
through oceans of mother air!
We are two tumbleweeds hurrying through the universe.
A DOING NOTHING POEM
After walking about all afternoon
Barefoot, in my shack,
I have grown long and transparent . . .
Like the sea slug
Who has lived alone doing nothing
For eighteen thousand years.
JUMPING OUT OF BED
Coming nearer and nearer the resonating chamber,
the poem begins to throw itself around
&nb
sp; wildly,
silent stretches of snow,
grass waving for hundreds of miles.
We leap up from our Sadducean pillow,
every spot is forgotten,
our hair is crinkly and gold.
The moon hovers over the drunk’s hut.
The teaspoon gleams in the trunk of the car.
THE POEM
Coming nearer and nearer the resonating chamber,
the poem begins to throw itself around
fiercely,
silent stretches of snow,
grass waving for hundreds of miles.
Intent pierces into hard wood, which grows dense
from inside, something mad penetrates
the wood,
something alive, something
human, like a violin that reverberates with thought.
A fierce intent that nature does not know of
drives inside the poem,
changes it,
thickens it with sober weight;
it is something dense, a human madness.
LOOKING AT CLOUD BANKS BELOW THE PLANE WINDOW
Hills of cloud, mountains of mist below.
What are they? Troll-heads,
Tufts of forgetfulness,
Childhood stories, dreams of someone’s death.
Perhaps a burbling up of blind affection . . .
The clouds are affectionate creatures
With their backs turned to us,
Crouched over a smiling landscape beneath.
How different these tuffy bodies are from ours!
They are secretive, but do not cling,
Are not afraid of a storm,
Willing to dissipate in the wind . . .
THE
MORNING
GLORY
(1975)
There is an old occult saying: whoever wants to see the invisible has to penetrate more deeply into the visible. All through Taoist and “curving lines” thought, there is the idea that our disasters come from letting nothing live for itself, from the longing we have to pull everything, even our friends, in to ourselves, and let nothing alone. If we examine a pine carefully, we see how independent it is of us. When we first sense that a pine tree doesn’t really need us, that it has a physical life and a moral life and a spiritual life that is complete without us, we feel alienated and depressed. The second time we feel it, we feel joyful. As Bashō says in his wonderful poem:
The morning glory—
another thing
that will never be my friend.
I
A BIRD’S NEST MADE OF WHITE REED FIBER
The nest is white as the foam thrown up when the sea hits rocks! It is translucent as those cloudy transoms above Victorian doors, and swirled like the hair of those intense nurses, gray and tangled after long nights in Crimean wards. It is something made and then forgotten, like our own lives, that we will entirely forget in the grave, when we are floating, nearing the shore where we will be reborn, ecstatic and black.
LEONARDO’S SECRET
(THE VIRGIN AND ST. ANNE)
The Virgin is thinking of a child—who will drive the rioters out of the Temple—and her face is smiling. Her smile is full, it reminds you of a cow’s side, or a stubble field with water standing in it.
Behind her head, jagged blue rocks. The pointed rocks slope up quietly, and fall back, washed by a blue light, like the light in an octopus’s eye. The rocks, though no one is there, are not empty of people.
The rocks have not been forgotten by the sea either. They are the old brains of the sea. They glow for several seconds every morning, as the old man who lives in a hut on the shore drinks down his glass of saltwater.
LOOKING AT A DEAD WREN IN MY HAND
Forgive the hours spent listening to radios, and the words of gratitude I did not say to teachers. I love your tiny ricelike legs, that are bars of music played in an empty church, and the feminine tail, where no worms of Empire have ever slept, and the intense yellow chest that makes tears come. Your tail feathers open like a picket fence, and your bill is brown, with the sorrow of a rabbi whose daughter has married an athlete. The black spot on your head is your own mourning cap.
SITTING ON SOME ROCKS IN SHAW COVE
I sit in a cliff hollow, surrounded by fossils and furry shells. The sea breathes and breathes under the new moon. Suddenly it rises, hurrying into the long crevices in the rock shelves, it rises like a woman’s belly as if nine months have passed in a second; rising like the milk to the tiny veins, it overflows like a snake going over a low wall.
I have the sensation that half an inch under my skin there are nomad bands, stringy-legged men with firesticks and wide-eyed babies. The rocks with their backs turned to me have something spiritual in them. On these rocks I am not afraid of death; death is like the sound of the motor in an airplane as we fly. And I still haven’t found the woman I loved in some former life—how could I, when I have loved only twice on this rock, though twice in the moon, and three times in the rising water. My two daughters run toward me, laughing, arms in the air. A bird with long wings comes flying toward me in the dusk, pumping just over the darkening waves. He has flown around the whole planet; it has taken him centuries. He returns to me the lean-legged runner laughing as he runs through the stringy grasses, and gives back to me my buttons, and the soft sleeves of my sweater.
AT A FISH HATCHERY IN STORY, WYOMING
A ranger is lifting fingerling trout from a pickup with his scoop. They are weighing the fingerlings for stocking. The man in black boots pours them out of his scoop into a tub set on a scale. The fish slip off the scoop shovel, five or six inches long, shiny, gleaming, full of life! How they twist and turn in the Wyoming sun, about to fall! They are immense reserves of pure energy, like snowbanks, like mountains, like millions of hands . . . and when they do fall, they leave behind pure strokes in the air, vanishing into the washtub of fish, that contains so much, like the white stones dropped by glaciers, and washed by chilly streams . . . or the furs wrapped around old shoulders in the back of caves, where the skins have been chewed by women with luminous faces, who glow because their child has come into the universe . . . and now lies on their naked breast, which gleams in the risen light like a fish.
AN OCTOPUS
I hear a ticking on the Pacific stones. A white shape is moving in the furry air of the seacoast. The moon narrow, the sea quiet. He comes close; a long time the stick ticks on over the rock faces. Is it a postal employee saddened by the sleet? It comes nearer. I talk. The shape talks, it is a Japanese man carrying a spear and a heavy-bellied little bag. The spear has a hook on the end. What are you looking for, clams? No! Octopus!
Did you get any? I found three. He sits down. I get up and walk over. May I see them? He opens the plastic bag. I turn on the flashlight. Something wet, fantastic, womblike, horse intestine-like. May I take hold of one? His voice smiles. Why not? I reach in. Dry things stick to my hands, like burrs from burdocks, compelling, pleading, dry, poor, in debt. You boil them, then sauté them. I look and cannot find the eyes. He is a cook. He ate them in Japan.
So the octopus is gone now from the mussel-ridden shelf with the low roof, the pool where he waited under the thin moon, but the sea never came back, no one came home, the door never opened. Now he is taken away in the plastic bag, not understood, illiterate.
A HOLLOW TREE
I bend over an old hollow cottonwood stump, still standing, waist high, and look inside. Early spring. Its Siamese temple walls are all brown and ancient. The halls have been worked on by the intricate ones. Inside the hollow walls there is privacy and secrecy, dim light. And yet some creature has died here.
On the temple floor feathers, gray feathers, many of them with a fluted white tip. Many feathers. In the silence many feathers.
LOOKING INTO A TIDE POOL
It is a tide pool, shallow, water coming in, clear, tiny white shell-people on the bottom, asking nothing, not even directions! On the surface, the no
duled seaweed, lying like hands, slowly drawing back and returning, hands laid on fevered bodies, moving back and forth, as the healer sings wildly, shouting to Jesus and his dead mother.
SEEING CREELEY FOR THE FIRST TIME
Creeley sits on a chair, pulling up his knees to laugh, like a boy, looking very insecure, unsure, like a boy at school with pants too short. He looks astoundingly like a crow—it is unbelievable—even his hair is somehow “crow hair.” Shining black, falling over his head that is full of determination to pester owls if he sees any. The beak is a crow beak, and the sideways look he gives, the head shoved slightly to the side by the bad eye, finishes it. And I suppose his language is crow language—no long open vowels, like the owl, no howls like the wolf, but instead short, faintly hollow, harsh sounds, that all together make something absolutely genuine, crow speech coming up from every feather, every source of that crow body and crow life.
The crows take very good care of their children, and are the most intelligent of birds, wary of human company, though when two or three fly over the countryside together, they look almost happy.
