Collected Poems

by Robert Bly

  5

  The captain is still alone on the ship, alone among the ocean-flying terns, the great hooded mergansers flopping at early dusk light over the sparse waves they have never been introduced to . . . Mist suddenly appears at mid-ocean . . . No assurances in the ocean.

  6

  When someone says, “You are a good captain!” you have only to reply, “I am not the captain!” When another says, “You make good wine,” you have to reply, “I am not the winemaker.” Who am I? So when a man like me steps out of the house at dawn, and breathes in the air, it seems to him that he has lived his whole life to create something dark!

  THE DRIED STURGEON

  I climb down the bank at Rock Island, Illinois, and cross some tracks. Westward the black railway bridge makes short hops across the river. The riverbank is confused with drifted leaves, the sand cold in late October.

  I see a dried-out fish. It is a sturgeon. It is stiff, all its sudden motion gone. I pick it up. Its speckled nose-bone leads back to the eyesocket, and behind that there is a dark hole where the gills once were.

  So just behind the head the darkness enters—the somberness under the bunched leaves, the soothing duskiness ten feet down in sand. The pine tree standing by the roadhouse holds the whole human night in one needle. And the sturgeon holds the sweetness of the hunchback’s dreams, where he is straight and whole again, and the earth is flat and crooked. The Virgin brings out four black stones for him from beneath her cloak.

  Behind the gill opening the scales go on toward the tail. The dry scales are swift, organized, tubular, straight and humorless as railways schedules or the big clamp of the boxcar, tapering into sleek womanly death.

  A BOUQUET OF TEN ROSES

  The roses lift from the green strawberry-like leaves, their edges slightly notched, for the rose is also the plum, the apple, the strawberry, and the cherry. Petals are reddish-orange, the color of a robin’s breast if it were silk. I look down into the face of one rose: deep down inside there are somber shades, what Tom Thumb experienced so low under chairs, in the carpet-darkness . . . those growing swirls of gathering shadows, which eyes up near lamps do not see. It is the calm fierceness in the aborigine’s eye as he holds his spear polished by his own palm. These inviting lamb-like falmers are also the moist curtains on the part of the woman she cannot see; and the cloud that opens, swarming and parting for Adonis. . . . It is an opening seen by no one, only experienced later as rain. And the rose is also the skin petals around the man’s stalk, the soft umber folds that enclose so much longing; and the tip shows violet, blind, longing for company, knowing already of an intimacy the thunderstorm keeps as its secret, understood by the folds of purple curtains, whose edges drag the floor.

  And in the center of the nine roses, whose doors are opening, there is one darker rose on a taller stem. It is the rose of the tumbling waters, of the strumming at night, the color of the Ethiopian tumblers who put their heads below their feet on the Egyptian waterfront, wheeling all over the shore. . . . This rose is the man sacrificed yesterday, the silent one wounded under the oak, the man whose dark foot needs to be healed. He experiences the clumsy feeling that can only weep. It is the girl who has gone down to the world below, disobeying her mother, in order to bring calm to the house, traveling alone . . . and the rose windows of Chartres, the umber moss on the stag’s antlers . . .

  VISITING EMILY DICKINSON’S GRAVE WITH ROBERT FRANCIS

  A black iron fence closes the graves in, its ovals delicate as wine stems. They resemble those chapel windows on the main Aran island, made narrow in the fourth century so that not too much rain would drive in . . . It is April, clear and dry. Curls of grass rise around the nearby gravestones.

  The Dickinson house is not far off. She arrived here one day, at fifty-six, Robert says, carried over the lots between by six Irish laboring men, when her brother refused to trust her body to a carriage. The coffin was darkened with violets and pine boughs, as she covered the immense distance between the solid Dickinson house and this plot . . .

  The distance is immense, the distances through which Satan and his helpers rose and fell, oh vast areas, the distances between stars, between the first time love is felt in the sleeves of the dress, and the death of the person who was in that room . . .

  Exultation is the going

  Of the inland soul to sea,

  Past the houses, past the headlands

  Into deep Eternity.

  . . . the distance between the feet and head as you lie down, the distance between the mother and father, through which we pass reluctantly.

  About her parents and their habit of prayer, Emily wrote to a friend, “My family addresses an Eclipse every morning, which they call their ‘Father.’”

  As we leave the cemetery, Robert says, “My apartment is small, but I took it because I could see her grave from my window.” He has given his life to seeing what is far away. He used to serve a visitor—in a small glass—wine made from his own dandelions. “Can you mistake us? . . . For this I have abandoned all my other lives.”

  FINDING AN OLD ANT MANSION

  The rubbing of the sleeping bag on my ear made me dream a rattlesnake was biting me. I was alone, waking the first morning in the North. I got up; the sky clouded, the floor cold. I dressed and walked out toward the pasture. And how good the unevenness of the pasture feels under tennis shoes! The earth gives little rolls and humps ahead of us . . .

  The earth never lies flat, but is always thinking, it finds a new feeling and curves over it, rising to bury a toad or a great man, it accounts for a fallen meteor, or stones rising from two hundred feet down, giving a little jump for Satan, and a roll near it for Calvin. . . . I turn and cut through a strip of cleared woods; only the hardwoods are still standing. As I come out into the pasture again, I notice something lying on the ground.

  It is a wood chunk, but it has open places in it, caves chewed out by something. The bark has fallen off, that was the roof. . . . I lift it up and carry it home kitty-corner over the field.

  When I set it on my desk, it stands. The base is an inch or two of solid wood, only a bit eaten by the acids that lie in pastures. The top four or five inches is also solid, a sort of forehead.

  In between the forehead and the base there are sixteen floors eaten out by ants. The floors flung out from the central core are light brown, the color of workmen’s benches, and old eating tables in Norwegian farmhouses. The open places in between are cave-dark, the heavy brown of barn stalls in November dusk, the dark the cow puts her head into at the bottom of mangers . . . A little light comes in from the sides, as when a woman at forty sees what her mother’s silences as she washed clothes meant, and which are the windows in the side of her own life she has not yet opened . . .

  And these open places are where the ant legions labored. The antlered layers awaken, as antennae brush the sandy roof ceilings, low and lanterned with the bull heat of their love. Now the lively almsgivers go forth, over the threshold polished by thousands of pintail-like feet, workers with their electricity for the whole day packed into their solid-state joints and carapaces. Caravans go out, climbing, gelid with the confidence of landowners; and soon they are at work, right here, making delicate balconies where their eggs can pass their childhood in embroidered chambers; and the infant ants awaken to old father-worked halls, uncle-loved boards, walls that hold the sighs of the pasture, the moos of confused cows, the sound of oak leaves in November, flocks of grasshoppers passing overhead, some car motors from the road, held in the sane wood, given shape by Osiris’s love.

  • • •

  Now it seems to be a completed soul home. These balconies are good places for souls to sit in the half-dark. If I put it on our altar, souls of the dead in my family can come and sit here, I will keep this place for them. The souls of the dead are no bigger than a grain of wheat when they come, yet they too like to have their back protected from the wind of nothing, from the wind of Descartes, and of all who grew thin in maternal depri
vation. Vigleik can come here, with his lame knee, pinned in 1922 under a tree he himself felled, rolling cigarettes with affectionate fingers, patient and protective. And my brother can sit here if he can find the time, he will bring his friend if he comes; my grandmother will come here surely, sometimes, with the ship she gave me. This balcony is like her kitchen to the southwest, its cobstove full of heating caves; and Olai with his favorite horse and buggy, horsehide robe over his knees, ready to start for town with his mustache; the dead of the Civil War, Thomas Nelson, fat as a berry, supported by his daughters: and others I will not name I would like to come. I will set out a drop of water and a grain of rye for them. What the ants have worked out is a place for our destiny, for we too labor, and no one sees our labor. My father’s labor who sees? It is in a pasture somewhere not yet found by a walker.

  III

  THE GRIEF OF MEN

  The Buddhist ordered his boy to bring him, New Year’s

  morning, a message. He

  woke; answered;

  tore open the message

  he himself had written, and signed, “Buddha.”

  “Busyness has caught you, you have slowed and stopped.

  If you start toward me, I

  will surely come

  to meet you.” He wept.

  Exhausted by work and travel, I walk.

  I hear the coot call his darkening call,

  and the dog’s doubt far back in his throat.

  A porcupine walks

  by the water at dusk;

  no one sees him, under the low bushes.

  Men have died on high slopes, as others watch.

  They look around, and do not see

  those they love most,

  and call out

  the sound the porcupine does not make.

  And fresh waters wash past the tidal sands,

  into the delta, wash past clear

  bars and are gone.

  Women can die

  in childbirth, Bertha, inwardly near me, died,

  my father’s sister. “No more children, that’s it,”

  the doctor said. They wanted a child.

  The doctor stands

  by the bed, but Bertha

  dies, her breath ends, her knees quiver and are still.

  Her husband will not lie quiet.

  He throws himself against the wall.

  Men come to hold him down.

  My father is there,

  sits by the bed long night after night.

  KENNEDY’S INAUGURATION

  Sister de Chantal hands

  Me the sticky pod

  Of the Sweet Gum Tree.

  New to me, it’s the size

  Of a cow’s eyeball, brown

  And prickly. Its seeing

  Is all gone, finished,

  Exploded out

  Through the eyeholes.

  I turn it in my palm;

  It pricks the tender skin.

  The hard-edged eye-

  Holes resemble hen

  Beaks widening in fear.

  Are the dogs coming?

  Where an ear

  Should be, another

  Beak is opening, where

  A comb should be, another

  Beak is opening. Fear

  Of the dogs makes

  The cries more hoarse.

  And what did I do today?

  I drove the long way twice

  So as not to pass

  The funeral home.

  I had three conversations,

  All distant. If I know

  So well how to live,

  Then why am I frightened?

  A man’s head has been

  Broken by a cannonball,

  One eye dangles out.

  King Leopold’s men

  Set up rubber plantations,

  Bring Bantus in

  To bleed the trees. Some

  Skip work. “If he’s

  A father, the best thing

  Is to cut off the hands.”

  A photographer catches

  The scene: The son’s hands

  Lie on the ground

  Between the father’s feet.

  In Nineteen Thirty-Eight,

  The Brown Shirts arrive,

  Take women away

  Into breeding hotels.

  Jews and Gypsies

  Bleed the trees.

  It is all prepared.

  Marilyn Monroe is there.

  I see her drugged

  Arm hanging out

  Over the side of the bed.

  Out of her back comes the Marine’s

  Cry for the medic.

  His foot is lying a few

  Feet away. His

  Lips are open, the brain

  Is missing—only

  The throat and the cry are there.

  And the President

  In the cold, the back of his head

  Still intact, lays

  One hand on the Bible.

  WRITTEN AT MULE HOLLOW, UTAH

  For Robert and Ollie

  After three days of talk, I long for silence and come here.

  It’s called Mule Hollow. I love this granite steep shooting

  upward. The base seems to remain

  in grief—all the children killed when you return to the cave.

  Haven’t you ever longed for all these cheerful noises

  to end? These hellos and goodbyes? We fall asleep speaking.

  Perhaps talking we sleep;

  our ability to stay awake stays hidden in rocks we never visit.

  This tree I stand beside—a stone wall behind it,

  sedimentary, moving in waves—it is neither tree nor pine;

  it has half-leaves, half-needles,

  and a scaly bark, like someone constantly waking up in the night.

  All the failures of the stone are perfectly clear—spoken—

  how it gave way to pressures, bent between humps,

  as when a man lets his hands

  climb over his head, and says, “It’s true, it’s true, why say it isn’t?”

  How many failures we hide, talking. When I am too public,

  I am a wind chime, ringing, to cheer up the black

  Angel Moroni, and feed him

  as he comes dancing, prancing, leaving turkey tracks in the mist.

  Talking, we do not say what we are! Sensing what others want,

  used to hiding from our parents, talking,

  not saying what we want,

  we sustain the brilliant glass skeleton on which we hang.

  THE BEAR’S TAIL

  1

  Herbs, turtle-faced porcupine babies,

  Fur, pawmarks on shore,

  The hair in the mouse’s ear.

  2

  This delight is the wheeling of the inexhaustible

  Bear, whose tail

  Dips again and again into the ocean.

  3

  We are like those rheumatic pilgrims, stalking

  In the night air,

  Driving flocks of angel cattle before them.

  4

  And the molluscs, the mollusc shells, grow large.

  Smoke twists up through water,

  The moon rockets up from the sea floor.

  5

  Long seeds drop into November loam.

  The mother throws off her clothes, descending—

  The Virgin is lost among the other stars.

  WORDS RISING

  For Richard Eberhart

  I open my journal, write a few

  Sounds with green ink, and suddenly

  Fierceness enters me, stars

  Begin to revolve, and pick up

  Alligator dust from under the ocean.

  The music comes, I feel the bushy

  Tail of the Great Bear

  Reach down and brush the sea floor.

  All those deaths we lived in the sunlit

  Shelves of the Dordogne, the tunes we sang

  To the newborn a
nd the skeletons

  Of Papua, the many times

  We died—wounded—under the cloak

  Of an animal’s sniffing, all of these

  Return, and the grassy nights

  We ran in the moonlight for hours.

  Watery syllables come welling up.

  Anger that barked and howled in the cave,

  The luminous head of barley

  The priest holds up, growls

  From under fur, none of that is lost!

  The old earth-fragrance remains

  In the word “and.” We experience

  “The” in its lonely suffering.

  We are bees then; language is the honey.

  Now the honey lies stored in caves

  Beneath us, and the sound of words

  Carries what we do not.

  When a man or woman feeds a few words

  With private grief, the shames we knew

  Before we could invent

  The wheel, then words grow. We slip out

  Into farmyards, where rabbits lie

  Stretched out on the ground for buyers.

  Wicker baskets and hanged men

  Come to us as stanzas and vowels.

  We see a million hands with dusty

  Palms turned up inside each verb,

  Lifted. There are eternal vows

  Held inside the word “Jericho.”