Collected Poems

by Robert Bly

  Then what is asked of us? To stop sacrificing one energy for another. They are not different energies anyway, not “male” or “female,” but whirls of different speeds as they revolve. We must learn to worship both, and give up the idea of one god. . . . I taste the snow, lying on a branch. It tastes slow. It is as slow as the whirl in the boulder lying beneath the riverbed. . . . Its swirls take nine thousand years to complete, but they too pull down the buffalo-skin boats into their abysses, many souls with hair go down.

  The light settles down in front of each snowflake,

  And the dark rises up behind it,

  And inside its own center it lives!

  THE LOVER’S BODY AS A COMMUNITY OF PROTOZOA

  This body is made of bone and excited protozoa . . . and it is with my body that I love the fields. How do I know what I feel but what the body tells me? Erasmus thinking in the snow, translators of Virgil who burn up the whole room, the man in furs reading the Arabic astrologer falls off his three-legged stool in astonishment—this is the body, so beautifully carved inside, with the curves of the inner ear, and the husk so rough, knuckle-brown.

  As we walk we enter the magnetic fields of other bodies, and every smell we take in the communities of protozoa see; and a being inside leaps up toward it, as a horse rears at the starting gate. When you and I come near each other, we are drawn down into the sweetest pools of slowly circling energies, slowly circling smells.

  The sunlight lays itself down before the protozoa,

  And night opens itself out behind it,

  And inside its own energy it lives!

  So the space between two people diminishes; it grows less and less; no one to weep; they merge at last. The sound that pours from the fingertips awakens clouds of cells far inside the other’s body, and beings unknown to us start out in a pilgrimage to their Saviour, to their holy place. Their holy place is a small black stone, that they remember from Protozoic times, when it was rolled away from a door . . . and it was after that they found their friends who helped them to digest the hard grains of this world. . . .

  The clouds of cells awaken, intensify, swarm; and they dance inside a ray of sunlight so thin we cannot even see it. But to them, each ray is a vast palace with thousands of rooms. From the cells, praise sentences begin to the rise to the man and woman singing in the room. He lets his arms climb above his head, and says, “Now do you still say you cannot choose the Road?”

  For Lewis Thomas

  and his The Lives of a Cell

  COMING IN FOR SUPPER

  It is lovely to follow paths in the snow made by human feet. The paths wind gaily around the ends of drifts, they rise and fall. How amazed I am, after working hard in the afternoon, that when I sit down at the table, with my elbows touching the elbows of my children, so much love flows out and around in circles. . . . The children have been working on a play.

  Each child flares up as a small fire in the woods. . . . Biddy chortles over her new hair, curled for the first time last night, over her new joke song.

  Yankee Doodle went to town,

  Riding on a turtle,

  Turned the corner just in time

  To see a lady’s girdle. . . .

  Mary knows the inscription she wants on her coffin if she dies young, and says it:

  Where the bee sucks there suck I

  In a cowslip’s bell I lie. . . .

  She is obstinate and light at the same time, a heron who flies pulling long legs behind, or balances unsteadily on a stump, aware of all the small birds at the edge of the forest, where it is shadowy . . . longing to capture the horse with only one hair from its mane. . . .

  Biddy can pick herself up and run over the muddy river bottom without sinking in; she already knows all about holding, and kisses each grownup carefully before going to bed; at the table she faces you laughing, bending over slightly toward you, like a tree bent in wind, protective of this old shed she is leaning over. . . .

  And all the books around on the walls are feathers in a great feather bed, they weigh hardly anything! Only the encyclopedias, left lying on the floor near the chair, contain the heaviness of the three-million-year-old life of the oyster-shell breakers, those long dusks—they were a thousand years long then—that fell over the valley from the cave mouth (where we sit). . . . The inventions found, then lost again . . . the last man killed by flu who knew how to weave a pot of river clay the way the wasps do. . . . Now he is dead and only the wasps know in the long river-mud grief. The marmoset curls its toes once more around the slippery branch, remembering the furry chest of its mother, long since sunk into a hole that appeared in the afternoon. . . .

  Dinner is finished, and the children pass out invitations composed with felt pens.

  You are invited to “The Thwarting of Captain Alphonse”

  PRINCESS GARDINER:

  Mary Bly

  CAPTAIN ALPHONSE:

  Wesley Ray

  AUNT AUGUST:

  Biddy Bly

  RAILWAY TRACK:

  Noah Bly

  TRAIN:

  Sam Ray

  Costumes and Sets by Mary Bly and Wesley Ray

  Free Will Offering Accepted

  HOW THE ANT TAKES PART

  Smoke rises from mountain depths, a girl walks by the water. This is the body of water near where we sleep. And the mountain climber picks his way up the rocky scarp. How far up on the mountainside he is! As he disappears over the pass, an ant in the village below hurries up his mound of dirt, a woman turns her face back to the stove. Her man at that instant feels some mistake in his heart. The girl moves her hands, all the images rearrange themselves, the bacteria go in swarms through the ocean-salted blood.

  WHEN THE WHEEL DOES NOT MOVE

  There is a dense energy that pools in the abdomen and wants to move and does not! It lies there fierce and nomadic, blocking the road, preventing anyone else from going by.

  When the sperm wants to move and does not, then it is as if the earth were not made for me at all, and I cannot walk with the cricket voyaging over his Gobi of wood chips; he is too free for me. I hear a howling in the air.

  And what the soul offers, we never see clearly, though the spears fly through the air, crossing above our heads . . . and the naked old man walks by the ecstatically grieving sea, by the tumbling waters . . . And how can the soul walk without its body? When its own seed stops the wheel, then the body lets nothing through its pores, it longs to groan and stretch out, to walk in procession shaking the sistrum, to disappear into the fog. . . .

  And it is knotted. The sun hunches over and walks with its eyes on the ground, the moon hardens, it will not pass away, it refuses to become the sickle but holds up its face at the window. . . . The water goes back disappointed to the root, the house of sticks falls, we stand alone on the plain. . . .

  TWO DAYS ON THE FARM

  Friend, this body is made of camphor and gopherwood. So for two days I gathered ecstasies from my own body, I rose up and down, surrounded only by bare wood and bare air and some gray cloud, and what was inside me came so close to me, and I lived and died!

  The grandfather comes back inquiringly to the farm, his son stares down at the pickup tire, the family lawyer loses his sense of incompetence for a moment.

  The faint rain of March hits the bark of the half-grown trees. The honeysuckle will drip water, the moon will grow wet sailing, the granary door turns dark on the outside, the oats inside still dry.

  THE ORCHARD KEEPER

  Snow has fallen on snow for two days behind the Keilen farmhouse . . . no one has walked through it, or looked at it. . . . It makes the sound the porgies hear near the ocean floor, the sound the racer hears before his death, the sound that lifts the buoyant swimmer in the channel.

  Wind blows four pigeon-grass heads, scarce and fine, above the snow. They are heron legs in white morning fog, a musical thought that rises as the pianist sits down at her table, the body laboring before dawn to understand its dream. . . .

 
Everyone else in the house is still asleep. . . . In its dream thin feet come down the mountainside, hooves clatter over the wooden bridges, walk along the stone walls, and then pause, and look in at an orchard, where a fount of water is rising in the air. . . . Men are lying asleep around its base, each with his sword lying under him. And the orchard-keeper, where is he?

  WE LOVE THIS BODY

  My friend, this body is made of energy compacted and whirling. It is the wind that carries the henhouse down the road dancing, and an instant later lifts all four walls apart. It is the horny thumbnail of the retired railway baron, over which his children skate on Sunday, it is the forehead bone that does not rot, the woman priest’s hair still fresh among Shang ritual things. . . .

  We love this body as we love the day we first met the person who led us away from this world, as we love the gift we gave one morning on impulse, in a fraction of a second, that we still see every day, as we love the human face, fresh after lovemaking, more full of joy than a wagonload of hay.

  WINGS FOLDING UP

  The cucumbers are thirsty, their big leaves turn away from the wind. I water them after supper; the hose lies curled near the rhubarb. The wind sound blows through the head; a smile appears on the sitter’s face as he sits down under a tree. What can be comforted in us words help, the sunken islands speak to us. . . .

  Is this world animal or vegetable? Others love us, the cabbages love the earth, the earth is fond of the heavens—a new age comes close through the dark, an elephant’s trunk waves in the darkness, so much is passing away, so many disciplines already gone, but the energy in the double flower does not falter, the wings fold up around the sitting man’s face. And these cucumber leaves are my body, and my thighs, and toes stretched out in the wind. . . . Well, waterer, how will you get through this night without water?

  SNOWED IN AGAIN

  Snow has been falling for three days. The horses stay in the barn. At four I leave the house, sinking to my waist in snow, and push open the door of my writing shack. Snow falls in. At the desk there is a plant in blossom.

  The plant faces the window where snow sweeps past at forty miles an hour. So the snow and the flowers are a little like each other. In both there is the same receiving, the longing to circle slowly upward or sink down toward roots. Perhaps the snow and the orangey blossoms are both the same flow, that starts out close to the soil, close to the floor, and needs no commandments, no civilizations, no drawing room lifted on the labor of the claw hammer, but is at home where one or two are present.

  The two people sit quietly near each other. In the storm, millions of years come close behind us. Nothing is lost, nothing is rejected. The body is ready to sing all night, and be entered by whatever wishes to enter the human body singing.

  THE CRY GOING OUT OVER PASTURES

  I love you so much with this curiously alive and lonely body. My body is a young hawk sitting on a tree by the Mississippi, in early spring, before any green has appeared on the earth beneath. Some days walnut hollows in my chest fill with crackling light and shadows. There birds drink from water drops. . . . My body loves you with what it extracts from the prudent man, hunched over his colony of lizards; and with that it loves you madly, beyond all rules and conventions. Even the six holes in the flute move about under the dark man’s fingers, and the piercing cry goes out over the grown-up pastures no one sees or visits at dusk except the deer, out of all enclosures, who has never seen any bed but his own of wild grass.

  I first met you when I had been alone for nine days, and now my lonely hawk body longs to be with you, whom it remembers . . . it knew how close we are, we would always be. There is death but also this closeness, this joy when the bee rises into the air above his hive to find the sun, to become the son, and the traveler moves through exile and loss, through murkiness and failure, to touch the earth again of his own kingdom and kiss the ground. . . .

  What shall I say of this? I say, praise to the first man who wrote down this joy clearly, for we cannot remain in love with what we cannot name. . . .

  THIS

  TREE WILL

  BE HERE

  FOR A

  THOUSAND

  YEARS

  (1979)

  After a storm the leafy tree is no longer solid,

  but the pine still throws a full shadow.

  It has found a place to be.

  For a thousand years it will not give up this place.

  —Tao Yuan-Ming

  I

  OCTOBER FROST

  Last night the first heavy frost.

  Now the brave alfalfa has sobered.

  It has folded, as if from great heat,

  and turned away from the north.

  The horse’s winter coat has come

  through the bark of the trees.

  Our ears hear tinier sounds,

  reaching far away east in the early darkness.

  WRITING AGAIN

  Oval

  faces crowding to the window!

  I turn away,

  disturbed—

  When I write of moral things,

  the clouds boil

  blackly!

  By day’s end

  a room of restless people,

  lifting and putting down small things.

  Well that is how I have spent this day.

  And what good will it do me in the grave?

  THE YEARLY FAILURE

  There are eyes in the dry wisps of grass,

  And invisible claws in the rooster’s eyes,

  The patient feet of old men in the boards left out all summer.

  Something is about to happen!

  Christ will return!

  But each fall it goes by without happening.

  The end of the pickup disappears

  Down the road; behind the barn we see

  Pigweed bent over like abandoned machines.

  SITTING IN FALL GRASS

  All day wind had called me,

  oceans, a yellow line streaking

  across the sky,

  bones thrown out.

  I walked to my sitting place,

  I sat down.

  As we close our eyes, what

  piles of bones we see!

  Ruined castles,

  trampled cinnamon,

  crinoline crushed in long grass.

  And voices that say,

  I am not like you . . .

  I must live so . . . condemned

  by an old yellow lion . . .

  NIGHT FARMYARD

  The horse lay on his knees sleeping.

  A rat hopping across scattered hay

  Disappeared under the henhouse,

  Where the chickens sat in their stiff darkness.

  Asleep they are bark fallen from an old cottonwood.

  Yet we know their souls are gone, risen

  Far into the upper air about the moon.

  DAWN IN THRESHING TIME

  The three-bottom plow is standing in the corner of a stubble field. The flax straw lies exhausted on the ground.

  The dawning sun slants over the wet pigeon grass, so that the slope of highway ditches is like a face awakening from sleep.

  The oat stubble is shiny. The farmer puts on his jacket and goes out. Swaths still to be combined are wet. Every morning as he gets up after thirty he puts on besides his jacket the knowledge that he is not strong enough to die, which he first felt deep in his wooden cradle at threshing time.

  READING IN FALL RAIN

  The fields are black once more.

  The old restlessness is going.

  I reach out with open arms

  to pull in the black fields.

  All morning rain has fallen

  steadily on the roof.

  I feel like a butterfly

  joyful in its powerful cocoon.

  •

  I break off reading:

  one of my bodies is gone!

  It’s outdoors, walking

  swiftly away in the rain!


  I get up and look out.

  Sure enough, I see

  the rooster lifting his legs

  high in the wet grass.

  OCEAN INSECTS

  Those insects, golden

  and Arabic, sailing in the husks of galleons,

  their octagonal heads also

  hold sand paintings of the next life.

  TO LIVE OR NOT

  “To live” means to pick up particles of death

  As a child picks up crumbs from beneath the table.

  “To exist” means to drop the bread behind you on the path

  Hoping the birds will find the crumbs and eat them.

  “To live” is to rush forward eating up your own death,

  Like a locomotive with its catcher on, hurrying into the night.