Collected Poems

by Robert Bly

  THE HOCKEY POEM

  For Bill Duffy

  1.The Goalie

  The Boston College team has gold helmets, under which the long black hair of the Roman centurion curls out. . . . And they begin. How weird the goalies look with their African masks! The goalie is so lonely anyway, guarding a basket with nothing in it, his wide lower legs wide as ducks’. . . . No matter what gift he is given, he always rejects it. . . . He has a number like 1, a name like Mrazek, sometimes wobbling on his legs waiting for the puck, or curling up like a baby in the womb to hold it, staying a second too long on the ice.

  The goalie has gone out to mid-ice, and now he sails sadly back to his own box, slowly; he looks prehistoric with his rhinoceros legs; he looks as if he’s going to become extinct, and he’s just taking his time. . . .

  When the players are at the other end, he begins sadly sweeping the ice in front of his house; he is the old witch in the woods, waiting for the children to come home.

  2.The Attack

  They all come hurrying back toward us, suddenly, knees dipping like oil wells; they rush toward us wildly, fins waving, they are pike swimming toward us, their gill fins expanding like the breasts of opera singers; no, they are twelve hands practicing penmanship on the same piece of paper. . . . They flee down the court toward us like birds, swirling two and two, hawks hurrying for the mouse, hurrying down wind valleys, swirling back and forth like amoebae on the pale slide, as they sail in the absolute freedom of water and the body, untroubled by the troubled mind, only the body, with wings as if there were no grave, no gravity, only the birds sailing over the cottage far in the deep woods. . . .

  Now the goalie is desperate . . . he looks wildly over his left shoulder, rushing toward the other side of his cave, like a mother hawk whose chicks are being taken by two snakes. . . . Suddenly he flops on the ice like a man trying to cover a whole double bed. He has the puck. He stands up, turns to his right, and drops it on the ice at the right moment; he saves it for one of his children, a mother hen picking up a seed and then dropping it. . . .

  But the men are all too clumsy, they can’t keep track of the puck . . . no, it is the puck, the puck is too fast, too fast for human beings, it humiliates them constantly. The players are like country boys at the fair watching the con man—The puck always turns up under the wrong walnut shell. . . .

  They come down the ice again, one man guiding the puck this time . . . and Ledingham comes down beautifully, like the canoe through white water or the lover going upstream, every stroke right, like the stallion galloping up the valley surrounded by his mares and colts, how beautiful, like the body and soul crossing in a poem. . . .

  3.The Fight

  The player in position pauses, aims, pauses, cracks his stick on the ice, and a cry as the puck goes in! The goalie stands up disgusted, and throws the puck out. . . .

  The player with a broken stick hovers near the cage. When the play shifts, he skates over to his locked-in teammates, who look like a nest of bristling owls, owl babies, and they hold out a stick to him. . . .

  Then the players crash together, their hockey sticks raised like lobster claws. They fight with slow motions, as if undersea . . . they are fighting over some woman back in the motel, but like lobsters they forget what they’re battling for; the clack of the armor plate distracts them, and they feel a pure rage.

  Or a fighter sails over to the penalty box, where ten-year-old boys wait to sit with the criminal, who is their hero. . . . They know society is wrong, the wardens are wrong, the judges hate individuality. . . .

  4.The Goalie

  And this man with his peaked mask, with slits, how fantastic he is, like a white insect who has given up on evolution in this life; his family hopes to evolve after death, in the grave. He is ominous as a Dark Ages knight . . . the Black Prince. His enemies defeated him in the day, but every one of them died in their beds that night. . . . At his father’s funeral, he carried his own head under his arm.

  He is the old woman in the shoe, whose house is never clean, no matter what she does. Perhaps this goalie is not a man at all, but a woman, all women; in her cage everything disappears in the end; we all long for it. All these movements on the ice will end, the seats will come down, the stadium walls bare. . . . This goalie with his mask is a woman weeping over the children of men, that are cut down like grass, gulls that stand with cold feet on the ice. . . . And at the end, she is still waiting, brushing away the leaves, waiting for the new children developed by speed, by war. . . .

  WALKING ON THE SUSSEX COAST

  A stone barn. The ground around is green, springy, rolling over into the ocean. The hoof marks in the muck outside the door mean only that the hoofs are glad to be going out, it is not an ominous sign. I stand a long time looking at the barn floor. The ground is fresh and yellow from tumbled bales. A portable wooden gate leans against the stone wall; it is calm, like an altar, some slivers missing. Maybe at night we split up into different beings, and one of them comes back here, to stand inside this barn, with only one eye, loved by the other cows, or at least recognized by the brown patches on my sides. How good to flop down here, our sides touching other cows, protected from seawind by stone walls that will later become the color of night. We know that at dawn we can look out the door and see the green hills again!

  A TURTLE

  The orange stripes on his head shoot forward into the future. The turtle’s slim head stretches out, and it pushes with all its might, caught now on the edge of my palm. The claws—five on the front, four in back—are curiously long and elegant, curved, pale, like a lieutenant’s sword. The yellow stripes on the neck and head remind you of racing cars.

  The bottom plate is a washed-out rose color from being dragged over the world. The imagination is simplified there, without too much passion, business-like—like the underside of a space ship.

  FROST ON THE WINDOWPANE

  Frost is glittery, excited, like so many things laid down silently in the night, with no one watching. Through the two lower panes the watcher can dimly see the three trunks of the maple, sober as Europe. The frost wavers, it hurries over the world, it is like the body that lies in the coffin, and the next moment has disappeared! The mind through its skin picks up the radio signals of death, reminders of the molecules flying all about the universe . . . the icy disembarking, chill fingertips, tulips at head and foot.

  I look at the upper panes and see more complicated roads . . . ribbons thrown down on the road . . .

  MY THREE-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER BRINGS ME A GIFT

  For Mary

  She comes and lays him carefully in my hand—a caterpillar! A yellow stripe along his back, and how hairy! Hairs wave like triumphal plumes as he walks.

  Just behind his head, a black something slants back, like a crime, a black memory leaning toward the past.

  He is not as beautiful as she thinks: the hair falling over his mouth cannot completely hide his face—two sloping foreheads with an eye between, and an obstinate jaw, made for eating through sleeping things without pain of conscience . . .

  Now he rears, looking for another world.

  LOOKING AT A DRY TUMBLEWEED BROUGHT IN FROM THE SNOW

  What is this wonderful thing? Brown and everywhere! It has leaped up on my desk like surf, or like a bull onto a cow! It rushes everywhere in front of me. . . . And my sleeping senses are shouted at, called in from the back of my head, to look at it! Well, it is only a broken-off bush, a tumbleweed, every branch different, and the whole bush the same, so that way it is like the sea. Taken in from the deserted shore, it talks of queens sent away to live in cramped farmhouses, living in the dirt, and it talks of coffins and amazing arrows, no it is a love, some love we forget every day, it is my mother.

  WATCHING ANDREI VOZNESENSKY READ IN VANCOUVER

  Andrei Voznesensky has a curious look like a wood animal, one that often lives not far from marshes, near places where the deer sink in up to their knees. Waiting to read while the translation is being spo
ken, he sits with an utterly expressionless face—he is a pool unstirred by wind . . . hair falling over the pale forehead is a little like birch branches swaying over the water . . .

  His shoes are elegant Italian cowboy shoes, patent leather. Black trousers and a blue shirt, with a folded silk tie always to protect the throat.

  He strolls slowly toward the microphone, his hands put in slit front pockets, the thumbs pointing toward each other. As he begins to read, his knees bend, the right hand swings back and forth like the Neanderthal man complimenting himself after having thrown the first stone.

  He looks straight forward, bending over slightly—a fantastic and resonant voice booms out, like enormous dynamos, like immense waterfalls falling, tremendous winds in the west sweeping up, swirling winds carrying bits of chairs, barn doors, dust from chickenhouse floors, fragments of wooden grave markers set up by old Carnation-condensed-milk-drinking trappers; the whirlwind veers off the gravel road onto stubble fields. . . .

  Sometimes the deep voice starts with a jolt, brought up from underneath by the right arm swinging forward . . .

  then it drops suddenly into the most matter-of-fact tone, emotionless, muttering. . . .

  The face has much mother-quality, his poems are mother-quality on fire, tenderness in flames, his voice is rushing water on fire, he is saying, it’s OK to be on fire, OK for water, it’s OK even for socialist concrete—

  The voice is coming from deep in his chest that is bent forward like a javelin about to be thrown. It is the voice of some deep-throated woman shouting at last, her voice rattling the dishes, men covering their ears in the basement, or turning near the kitchen door and going back to the barn. . . . How good it feels to be able to shout about the pet chicken killed by men when you were a girl . . . to shout about the doll bureau painted with roses given to that other girl . . . how good it feels to shout at last!

  STANDING UNDER A CHERRY TREE AT NIGHT

  For the Rapps

  The cherry branches sway . . . they are arms that prophesy music, hands that follow the note just about to come. The clumps of blossoms look heavily down, and are women’s faces, not angry with us, who forgive and return petals to the earth. And I too sway like these boughs, as if in heavy canyons, hardly making ground, moving upstream against tiny cedar twigs being turned over and over in the cloudy spring river coming down.

  All day I walked by the sea! I climbed down the cliffs at times to sit with the black mussels. Finally, I am back here, in the garden, where the night air is affectionate, the stars are a transparent mountain range . . . and I am a human being standing in the dark, looking at the cherry branches above him swaying against the night sky not far from the sea!

  TWO PROSE POEMS ON LOCKED-IN ANIMALS

  1.Lobsters Waiting to Be Eaten in a Restaurant Window

  A Saturday night. The area is cold, deserted. In a water tank set in the window there are many many small lobsters with crossed eyes, that are black and unsure—they make a fantastic forest of waving claws and movable armors. Sometimes they turn up to the sky, as if praying after some catastrophe, or climb over each other like clumsy men in splints; or stare steadily, the white hairs under their chins beating.

  2.Bored Elephants in the Circus Stable

  The elephants rock back and forth, their vast gray heads with indented temples swaying in the light coming down above them. Their bodies gray and wrinkled sway like the sea at dawn. It is a sea with no islands, no vegetation floating on it, no dry sticks even, only fish-shaped animals with no mouths swerving angrily in the gray water.

  WATERFALL COMING OVER A CLIFF

  HARDANGER, NORWAY

  Eight hundred feet up, there is water pouring out of the sky! It drops a few feet, and then the long plunge, after the slanting blow off the cliff. . . . It is a deep plunge, loveless, floating; it falls by the cliff like tufts of sleep . . . the long sleep the truckdriver sinks into after he has driven three days from the coast, or the clouds that pass across the sky of a dog’s eyes, when he dies in a room with human beings . . . or the glimpse the meditator has of something floating under the water, neither moving nor not moving, seeming to slow as it nears the bottom.

  IN THE COURTYARD OF THE ISLETA MISSION

  Behind the Church in the Isleta Pueblo, here is a courtyard. The sun comes down from the purest ant heavens. On the old flagstones the ants trail after each other, between a fireweed and a rock chip, as they did when the European friars awoke and walked here in the morning. The New Mexico trees are spare and detached; wind moves through branches that do not want the wealth of the world.

  Inside the Church, the coffins of the old priests rose every spring. The people stood near the altar and watched. One day a German priest arrived. He said it was only the rising water table, he got ready to bury them again, outside. The Indians collected him one night, covered him with chains, threw him out of the car, padlocked the Church, and closed the rectory.

  Now the courtyard is left to the ants and the wind, and the priests rise and fall as they wish, an Indian man carries a six-pack of Pepsi across the desert plaza, and the clear shadows falling on the adobe walls resemble the airiest impulses we have, that want to live, and will, if we agree to put ourselves in the hands of the ants.

  A POEM ABOUT TENNESSEE

  REELFOOT LAKE, WEST TENNESSEE

  For Stephen Mooney

  We are in Reelfoot Lake, Green Island Cutoff. It is a wide ditch, cut into the Tennessee earth. Some lily pads rise above the water, like hands held up to receive; others lie flat on the surface, like opened books. A rotted carcass lies on the shore as we pass, sending out reminders, maybe a buffalo fish, or a pig, or an immense beaver; now it is a rotted glove, with the hand still inside. A muskrat swims past like a commuter. Two cardinals in the bushes like red nuns. How heavy the water is, the small swirl near the boat, it is a sculpture disappearing again into the stone.

  This is Tennessee, the sun hollering through the lonesome marsh trees. Three pines lean sideways over the exiled Mississippi water, some dead fish float by like neglected wives. There are Indian villages nearby, tears fill the sockets of the Indian grandmothers as they see their grandsons; dreams of luminous bird-points, delicate as wren eyes . . . the setting sun rolls like a puppy over the water, “water that is ours” the Indians said; the low hills of Tennessee, with their frail mimosa-hair half leafed out, hard nights in cabins with tired women, the flint-gun hung like Calvin over the fireplace, lying on upturned deer-feet, long nights when the porcupines ate and Andrew Jackson slept a good sleep, his dreams of the Presidency bordered by coffins and women proud of him . . . the rope ahead of me on the prow is lonely here, so near the immense Mississippi that carries our lonelinesses, and gathers them all together, the Mississippi on which so many black bodies have floated home, near which so many husbands with English names have looked somberly down at the legs of tables in the kitchen, and then longed to disappear into the burning sun, and live there high in eagles’ nests, with bare sticks around them. . . . I can hear the water obeying on each side of the boat, this is Tennessee, Tennessee waters, with cypress knees breathing, and men who do care, and look sideways before they talk, we are all here in the heavy waters, where the cypresses live, “I shall give thanks in Tennessee!” Sputt and Ed throw the rope up on the dock, we come in, the shadows in Rembrandt, the black and white tiles on the floor, the map above on the wall.

  THE BLACK CRAB DEMON

  The ocean swirls up over the searock. It falls back, returns, and rushes over a whirlhole the shape of a galaxy. A black crab climbs up the searock sideways, like a demon listening in Aramaic.

  All at once, I am not married; I have no parents; I wave my black claws and hurry over the rock. I hold fast to the bottom; no night-mother can pry me loose; I am alone inside myself; I love whatever is like me. I am glad no seabeast comes to eat me; I withdraw into the rock caverns and return; I hurry through the womb-systems at night.

  Last night in my dream a man I did not know whisper
ed in my ear that he was disappointed in me, and that I had lost his friendship. . . . How often have I awakened with a heavy chest, and yet my life does not change.

  A ROCK ISLET ON THE PACIFIC

  The sea boils in over underwater rocks, then swiftly pulls back, among currents with different thoughts, everything sweeping and howling. . . . Now the sea is suddenly motionless, making the holes on the rock floor clear.

  But thoughts hurry in again, trying to leap up the sides; the whole inlet is like an eyeball, mad sights climbing the walls.

  My own nostrils feel the bite of the salt. The sloshing water is too wild for seaweed, but limpets understand—this sloshing goes on for centuries, but no one gets tired of it . . . there is no one to get tired! The man sitting by the sea sits silent for hours, then suddenly breaks out singing. As the heart pumps it senses the seawaters entering and leaving, jumping up and nearly touching the tern’s foot. The jellyfish opens and closes, our mouth longs for the saltwater.

  II

  THE POINT REYES POEMS

  NOVEMBER DAY AT McCLURE’S BEACH