Collected Poems

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Collected Poems Page 22

by Robert Bly


  But just. That part

  Of you cleaned

  My bones more

  Than once. But I

  Will meet you

  In the young hawk

  Whom I see

  Inside both

  You and me.

  This young hawk

  Guided you

  Into the air—

  And will guide

  You now to

  The Lord of Night,

  Who will give

  You the tenderness

  You wanted here.

  DREAM OF MYSELF AT TWELVE

  At the start of the dream

  It was understood you were working

  In the grape fields. But

  When I walked

  Into the barn, I saw

  A leg sticking

  From the hay. It was you, hiding,

  Not working. “How

  Long have you

  Been here?” Your head

  Rose from the hay.

  My mother, your calm wife,

  Showed up, spoke

  For you, said,

  “Jacob, you haven’t been

  Drinking, have you?”

  How often as a child I heard

  That and did nothing.

  This time I broke

  A horse-collar, threw

  A gun into

  The horse-stall, jabbed

  A pitchfork into

  Loose hay,

  Hit the hired man.

  My father said nothing.

  My brother said it was clear

  I could never be-

  Come a man,

  Would have to play with toys.

  Then I looked

  Down at the yellow straw

  In the stable, my tongue

  Still. As I

  Woke, a small boy

  Clung to me,

  Could not feel safe,

  Would not take

  His arms

  From around my neck.

  IN THE FUNERAL HOME

  1

  I missed the hour of your death.

  The coffin lid

  Lifted shows some

  Fall oak leaves sewn

  High above

  Your winter face.

  I have at last some

  Leisure near

  Your cream-colored hands.

  I write down what you did,

  Or did wrong, or did

  Not do at all.

  The funeral director, a kind

  Man, says, “I’ll

  Go upstairs now

  With my family. You sit as long

  As you like.

  No one is here.”

  2

  Your marriage held in-

  Visible mountains, touching

  And not touching . . .

  Too much isolation. I’m not sure

  You married at all,

  Or whom you married.

  For twenty-five years,

  An adult, I lived

  A half-mile from you.

  Why? Perhaps I couldn’t get

  Enough, or perhaps

  I was your wife.

  Weren’t you my husband?

  A hurtful man,

  Reckless, wrathful, solemn,

  Able to break a man or a book,

  Gentle, un-

  Churched, bold.

  We had twenty-four

  Anniversaries then,

  Before I moved again,

  At fifty-three,

  No longer needing

  To be married to you.

  As I wrote that down, your head

  Turned slowly

  In the coffin, your jaw

  Opened, the teeth showed

  Themselves; then

  Your head rolled back.

  3

  Did I tell you that I regret

  Being so agreeable

  To you in childhood?

  I left at seventeen,

  A mother’s boy,

  Dreamy, smart.

  I moved back at twenty-

  Eight, with a

  Wife, a half-

  Mile from you. By then

  I had found out

  What I wanted.

  I said it in a poem:

  “I want to have

  No wife, build

  A house with one door,

  Be called

  Away by wind.”

  4

  You spoke often of the Prince

  Of Wales, whom

  You admired.

  He too wanted something

  More—and

  He had to steal it.

  An old man said to me:

  “Your father was

  The only man

  In the whole county

  Who read books

  During the Depression.”

  5

  What good was all that

  Seeing we did,

  So as to miss

  Pheasant nests as we

  Mowed or rocks

  As we plowed?

  I lay my palm on

  Your chest. Your chest

  Is thin below

  The burial suit,

  A chicken’s breast

  Below my hand.

  Do we have time for

  Each other now?

  Do you have

  Time for me? Seeing

  Is good, as Marvell

  Said, but eyes

  Are also for weeping.

  As I stand next

  To you in your long

  Coffin, I see we

  Have more time

  Than we can use.

  A DREAM OF THE BLACKSMITH’S ROOM

  I dreamt last night you

  Lived nearby, not

  Dead at all, but safe

  In a blacksmith’s storage room,

  With bolts and nails in bins

  From floor to ceiling.

  You came and brought me

  An ivory jar,

  Holding a precious fluid,

  Which I took. I knew it meant

  The time had come,

  But I let you leave.

  Later a man pushed open

  The door and threw

  Your body down, a wizened,

  Astonishingly small body—

  Rope still tied

  Around the neck.

  I cried out to my wife,

  “He didn’t die

  That way!” The man who threw

  The body said, “It’s over. You

  Don’t have to

  Rescue him again.”

  III

  MEDITATIONS ON THE INSATIABLE SOUL

  1

  The man who sits up late at night cutting

  His nails, the backs of black whales, the tip

  Of the mink’s tail, the tongue that slips out of lips, all of these

  Testify to a soul used to eating and being eaten.

  Urged on by the inner pressure of teeth,

  Some force, animal-born, is slippery, edgy,

  Impatient, greedy to pray for new heavens,

  Unforgiving, resentful, like a fire in dry wood.

  2

  Greeks sit by the fire cleaning their bright teeth.

  Let Portia grieve in her sorrowing house.

  Let blackbirds come. The insatiable soul

  Begins to eat shellfish, the Caribbean islands,

  The rainforests, Amazon. Who wants to eat the meat

  Cooked in the Holocaust? Oh, you know.

  The traveler asleep in Charlemagne’s cave

  Laughs in his murky unshaven dream.

  3

  Some ill-smelling, libidinous, worm-shouldered

  Deep-reaching desirousness rules the countryside.

  Let sympathy pass, a stranger, to other shores!

  Let the love between men and women be ground up

  And fed to the talk shows! Let every female breast

  Be photographed! Let the father be hated! Let the son be hated!


  Let twelve-year-olds kill the twelve-year-olds!

  The Great Lord of Desirousness ruling all.

  4

  Northern lights illumine the storm-troll’s house.

  There men murdered by God promenade.

  The buffalo woman plays her bony flute calling

  The lonely father trampled by the buffalo god.

  The foreskins of angels shelter the naked cradle.

  The stew of discontents feeds the loose souls.

  And the owl husbands the moors, harries the mouse,

  Beforehand, behindhand, with his handsome eyes.

  ANGER AGAINST CHILDREN

  The vet screams, and throws his crutch at a passerby.

  “Hey, lady, you want to meet a child-killer?”

  African drums play all night for the women

  With their heads down on motel tables.

  Parents take their children into the deepest Oregon forests,

  And leave them there. When the children

  Open the lunchbox, there are stones inside, and a note saying, “Do your own thing.”

  And what would the children do if they found their way home in the moonlight?

  The planes have already landed on Maui, the parents are on vacation.

  Our children live with a fear at school and in the house.

  The mother and father do not protect the younger child from the savagery of the others.

  What is it like to have stayed this long in civilization—

  To have witnessed the grave of Tutankhamun open once more—

  What is it like to wear sweatshirts and bluejeans

  And wait for hours to see the bracelets of those wasteful death-coddlers,

  Who learned to conquer conscious life?

  What is it like to have the dynamo, the lightbulb,

  the Parliamentary system,

  the electrical slaves embedded in

  elevator doors,

  The body scanners that see sideways, the extravagant and elegant fighters,

  And still be unconscious? What is that like?

  Well, of course there is rage.

  The thirty-four-year-old mother

  Wants to reject the child still in the womb,

  And she asks Senators to pass laws to prevent that.

  The husband dreams of killing his wife, and the wife lays plots.

  She imagines that he is an Oppressor,

  And that she is an Aztec Princess.

  In the night she holds an obsidian knife over her husband’s sleeping body.

  He dreams he is a deer being torn apart by female demons.

  This is the rage that shouts at children.

  This is the rage that cannot be satisfied,

  Because each year more ancient Chinese art objects go on display.

  So the rage goes inward at last,

  It ends in doubt, in self-doubt, dyeing the hair, and love of celebrities.

  The rage comes to rest at last in the talk show late at night,

  When the celebrities without anger or grief tell us that only the famous are good, only they live well.

  There are waifs inside us, broken by the Pauline gospels;

  We know them,

  And those who step on desire as a horse steps on a chick.

  No cry comes out, only silence, and the faint whisper of the collapsing birdskull.

  Here the sleepers sleep, here the Rams and the Bears play.

  The old woman weeps at night in her room at the Nursing Facility.

  There are no bridges over the ocean.

  She sees a short dock, and ahead of that darkness, hostile waters, lifting swells,

  Fitfully lit, or not lit at all.

  Tadpoles drowse in the stagnant holes.

  The gecko goes back to his home in the cold rain.

  The wife of the Chrysler dealer is in danger of being committed again.

  She left the hospital hopeful, she struggles hard,

  She reads Laing and Rollo May;

  But nothing works, she dreams she is interned in Burma.

  Cars go past her house at night, Japanese soldiers at the wheel.

  Nothing can be done, the kernel opens, all is swept away;

  She is carried out of sight.

  The doctor arrives; once more she leaves dry-eyed for the hospital.

  I am twenty-eight again. I sleep curled up,

  My fingers widen as I sleep, my toes grow immense at night.

  Tears flow; I am in some bin apart from him I love.

  The ocean king, far at sea, lies alone on his bed.

  His interior engine has been catapulted into fragments,

  Valves and drive shaft scattered, the engine mount settles to sand.

  The saddened king goes about, all night he reaches down,

  Picking up bolts from the sand, and piston rings; by morning all is scattered again.

  We wake, no dream is remembered, the scenes gone into smoke.

  We are in some enormous place, abandoned,

  Where Adam Kadmon has been forgotten, the luminous man is dissolved.

  The sarcophagus contains the rotted bones of the monks; so many lived in the desert.

  None are alive, only the bones lie in the dust.

  My friend goes to Philadelphia to claim his father’s body.

  It lies in an uncarpeted room in the ghetto, there was no one else to claim the body.

  The time of manifest destiny is over, the time of grief has come.

  IV

  ST. GEORGE, THE DRAGON, AND THE VIRGIN

  A SCULPTURE MADE BY BERNT NOTKE IN 1489 FOR STOCKHOLM CATHEDRAL

  St. George fights the dragon.

  The spiny dragon,

  Who lives in the rat-

  Filled caves, is losing.

  He fights back,

  As when a child

  Lifts his four

  Feet to hold

  Off the insane

  Parent. The dragon

  Hand grasps the wooden

  Lance that has

  Penetrated his thorny

  Chest, but . . .

  Too late . . .

  And this girlish knight?

  Oh I know him.

  I read the New

  Testament as I lay

  Naked on my bed

  As a boy.

  That solar boy

  Rises up radiant

  With his forehead-

  Eye that sees past

  The criminals’ gibbet

  To the mindful

  Towers of the spirit city.

  I hate this boy

  Whom I have been

  Lifting his lance above

  The father. Each of us

  Has been this marsh

  Dragon on his back.

  He is Joseph, Grendel,

  What we have forgotten,

  The great spirit

  The alchemists knew of,

  Without whom is nothing.

  As children, we knew ours

  Was a muddy greatness.

  How long it took

  To break down that horse

  So that he would agree

  To abet the solar boy.

  This earth-handed, disreputable,

  Hoarse-voiced one

  Is dying, all

  Over the world.

  And the Virgin?

  She prays

  On her knees while

  This goes on,

  As well she might.

  I wrote this to bless

  The swamp monster

  And the marsh hag

  Who bore him.

  IVAR OAKESON’S FIDDLE

  Let it be, let

  It be. Let it be!

  Portia awakes

  In her sorrowing house;

  The Orkney serpent

  Lies close beside her,

  Curls around her arm.

  But the sorrowing fiddle

  Has stayn awake all night.

  The wooden-walled house
>
  Is a resonating box.

  The wood gourd that loves

  The strings cries out

  To those who love to dance.

  Lovers and husbands

  Whirl round and round.

  Men and women

  Sweat and shout, kick-

  Ing and invit-

  Ing their desire.

  Oh, let it be.

  QUESTION IN THE LOS GATOS HILLS

  How often I have

  Called to ponderable

  Things: these

  Eucalyptus-smelling

  Sea-fogged

  Hills

  And chimney-hiding

  Gorges;

  I have called

  Boulders to

  Enter my poems,

  Black dusty

  Earth, rangy

  Minnesota grass.

  Why do I hesitate

  Then to

  Call to God?

  Years ago I

  Sat curled up

  Behind a shed,

  Saying to myself:

  “You are a boy

  Who will never

  Be heard.”

  Forget that idea.

  You are no

  Longer a boy.

  Let the sound come

  Out of the mouth.

  You hear the sitar

  Cry, let the poem

  Cry, even from

  Behind the shed,

  Where we all are.

  HOW DAVID DID NOT CARE

  What does it mean to live

  As those before

  Have lived? A field

  Of boisterous men

  And women who lift,

  Shouting, singing,

  And dancing a sheaf

  Of wheat up to the sun.

  When David danced for joy,

  We guess he did not care.

  When David played

  The Song of Degrees

  On his lute, when he cried,

  “My bones call out

 

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