Collected Poems

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Collected Poems Page 24

by Robert Bly


  VISITING THE EIGHTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD POET

  The eighty-five-year-old man stands up,

  And walks to the bookcase, his hair tousled,

  His legs thin, to fetch a book, then pulls

  It down and says, “No doubt you’ve already read this?”

  He has. He paddles among these ice floes,

  These enormous fat books, like a great Eskimo

  Hunter, for there are seals below in the sea,

  Offering their hides, their fat, their great lonesome eyes.

  “Oh yes!” he says, “Oh yes.” Some truths have been

  Said. Someone in China or Hardanger has written great

  Poems. “Oh yes.” He stands again, goes to the wall.

  “Emerson was a keen reader. Oh yes!”

  He has lived his whole life on three acres

  Of apple trees, chopping wood, visiting

  The madhouse, throwing plates against the wall,

  Translating, packing apples, writing poems.

  I am proud to know him, this old man late in life

  Who stands up and says, “No doubt you’ve already lived this?”

  For the Norwegian poet Olav H. Hauge

  ALL THESE STORIES

  There are so many stories. In one, a bear

  Marries a sailing ship, and they have children

  Who are islands (covered with low brush).

  In another an obstinate woman floats upstream.

  Or the child wailing on a rock, set ashore

  By her seal mother (her real mother), waits

  And wails, and faces appear at windows until

  Charlotte Brontë agrees to begin her novel.

  You know stories like that. The Terrible Nurse

  Throws the Daughter into the sea. A whale

  Swallows her, and she is free from husband

  And children long enough to be herself.

  Something in us wants things to happen.

  We twist our ankle and end up reading Gibbon.

  In some dreams a wolf pursues us until we

  Turn into swallows, and agree to live in longing.

  THE RESEMBLANCE BETWEEN YOUR LIFE AND A DOG

  I never intended to have this life, believe me—

  It just happened. You know how dogs turn up

  At a farm, and they wag but can’t explain.

  It’s good if you can accept your life—you’ll notice

  Your face has become deranged trying to adjust

  To it. Your face thought your life would look

  Like your bedroom mirror when you were ten.

  That was a clear river touched by mountain wind.

  Even your parents can’t believe how much you’ve changed.

  Sparrows in winter, if you’ve ever held one, all feathers,

  Burst out of your hand with a fiery glee.

  You see them later in hedges. Teachers praise you,

  But you can’t quite get back to the winter sparrow.

  Your life is a dog. He’s been hungry for miles,

  Doesn’t particularly like you, but gives up, and comes in.

  READING IN A BOAT

  I was glad to be in that boat, floating

  Under oak leaves that had been

  Carved by crafty light.

  How many times during the night

  I laughed, because She

  Came near, and stayed, or returned.

  The boat stopped, and I woke.

  But the pages kept turning. I jumped

  Back in the book, and caught up.

  I was not in pain, not hungry,

  Friend, I was alive, sleeping,

  And all that time reading a book.

  WAKING ON THE FARM

  I can remember the early mornings—how the stubble,

  A little proud with frost, snapped as we walked.

  How the John Deere tractor hood pulled heat

  Away from our hands when we filled it with gas.

  And the way the sun brought light right out of the ground.

  It turned on a whole hill of stubble as easily as a single stone.

  Breathing seemed frail and daring in the morning.

  To pull in air was like reading a whole novel.

  The angleworms, turned up by the plow, looked

  Uneasy like shy people trying to avoid praise.

  For a while we had goats. They were like turkeys

  Only more reckless. One butted a red Chevrolet.

  When we washed up at noon, we were more ordinary.

  But the water kept something in it of the early morning.

  WHEN THRESHING TIME ENDS

  There is a time. Things end.

  All the fields are clean.

  Belts are put away.

  And the horses go home.

  What is left endures

  In the minds of boys

  Who wanted this joy

  Never to end.

  The splashing of hands,

  Jokes and oats:

  It was a music

  Touching and fervent.

  The Bible was right.

  Presences come and go.

  Wash in cold water.

  The fire has moved.

  A FAMILY PHOTOGRAPH, SUNDAY MORNING, 1940

  They’ve gathered on the farm lawn, ten people, all ages.

  Esther Berg’s hair has waves like Clara Bow’s;

  The women look as if they have too much to do.

  One boy smiles—it is me—and looks down. He seems glad,

  But his sweater sleeve is too short. The men’s hands,

  None placed in pockets, all hang down.

  They look as if they wanted to grasp something.

  The men smile, but their eyes say hard things.

  “The world pulls at me—it tore my father

  Away already. That forty-acre farm he bought

  By Marietta is still black. I have to go now.”

  It was nineteen-forty, grasshoppers, hard times.

  Two old women who guard the group on both sides

  Take nothing on trust. “I trust my hands, and that’s all.”

  A FARM IN WESTERN MINNESOTA

  When I look at childhood, I see the yellow rose bush

  Grandma planted near her door, the gravel

  Beneath the bicycle tires, and the new legs pumping

  As we raced along; and the roads that invited us

  West—only a mile from home the land began to rise.

  We tried those wind chargers. My father

  Was open to any new idea, and one day

  A thousand sheep—starving—arrived in cattle cars

  From Montana—almost free. We took four

  Hundred. How thin they were! Some lived for years.

  Many rooms were cold at night, and the hired men

  Didn’t have much of a life. Sometimes they’d just leave.

  I remember my father throwing dead ewes over

  The edge of the gravel pit. It was efficient. There

  Was work to do, but no one learned how to say goodbye.

  FOR A CHILDHOOD FRIEND, MARIE

  She knew a lot about life on a farm: wagon

  Poles that sometimes broke, and grown men

  Pinned against the fencepost by a bull.

  Sometimes you tie a favorite lamb

  To a tree so that the old bucks will not kill him,

  And he hangs himself from the rope.

  Movies Saturday night—girls laughed

  Behind their sleeves, at men or boys.

  Marie, thirty years old, still loved

  The high school, the tall boys, gossip

  About the teachers, the proms. She also

  Loved our lives that were not going

  So well. She married the hired man—

  My grandmother told her not to—and he drank.

  WHAT THE ANIMALS PAID

  The Hampshire ewes standing in their wooden pens,

  Their shiny black hooves close to each other,
/>
  Had to pay with their wool, with their wombs,

  With their eating, with their fear of the dogs.

  Every animal had to pay. Horses paid all day;

  They pulled stone-boats and the ground pulled back.

  And the pigs? They paid with their squealing

  When the knife entered the throat and the blood

  Followed it out. The blood, steaming and personal,

  Paid it. Any debt left over the intestines paid.

  “I am what I am.” The pig could not say that.

  The women paid with their bowed heads, and the men,

  My father among them, paid with their drinking.

  Demons shouted: “Pay to the last drop!”

  THE BEAR AND THE MAN

  Suppose there were a bear and a man. The bear

  Knows his kin—old pebbles, fifty-five-

  Gallon barrels, big pine trees in the moonlight,

  Abandoned down jackets; and the man approaches warily—

  He’s read Tolstoy, knows a few symphonies.

  That’s about it. Each has lost a son. The bear’s

  killed by a trap, the man’s killed by a bear.

  That boy was partly drunk, alone in the woods.

  The bear puts out black claws firmly on earth.

  He’s not dumb. Skinned, he’s like a man. People

  Say that both bears and men receive a signal

  Coming from far up there, near the North Pole.

  WHEN MY DEAD FATHER CALLED

  Last night I dreamt my father called to us.

  He was stuck somewhere. It took us

  A long time to dress, I don’t know why.

  The night was snowy; there were long black roads.

  Finally, we reached the little town, Bellingham.

  There he stood, by a streetlamp in cold wind,

  Snow blowing along the sidewalk. I noticed

  The uneven sort of shoes that men wore

  In the early Forties. And overalls. He was smoking.

  Why did it take us so long to get going? Perhaps

  He left us somewhere once, or did I simply

  Forget he was alone in winter in some town?

  III

  THE GREEN COOKSTOVE

  A lonely man once sat on a large flat stone.

  When he lifted it, he saw a kitchen: a green

  Enamel range with big claw feet, familiar.

  Someone lives in that room, cooking and cackling.

  “I saw her once,” Virgil said. “She and Helen

  Were sisters.” Menelaus

  Sits by the window, peeling garlic cloves,

  And throwing bread crusts to the chickens.

  We’ll never understand this. Somewhere below

  The flat stone of the skull, a carnivorous couple

  Lives and plans future wars. Are we innocent?

  These wars don’t happen by accident—they occur

  Too regularly. How often do we lift the plate

  At the bottom of our brain and throw some garlic

  And grain down to the kitchen? “Keep cooking,

  My dears,” we say. “Something good will come of this.”

  THE PLAYFUL DEEDS OF THE WIND

  Sometimes there’s the wind. Sometimes the wind

  Takes a certain scrap of paper, and blows

  It back into the Bible. Then your family line

  Is whole, and your great-great-grandparents

  Stretch out in the coffin, and rest. That’s something

  Wind can do. Sometimes wind blows

  A skirt up an inch or two, and the body

  Signs a contract for its novel; then babies

  Come, and people sit at breakfast, and the old

  Words get spoken. Or the wind blows an ash

  Into the anarchist’s eye, and he pulls

  The trigger too soon, and kills the King instead of

  The fat factory owner, and then

  A lot of men get on motorcycles. They

  Dig trenches, and the wind blows the gas

  Here and there, and you and I get nothing

  Out of that wind except blind uncles

  And a boy at the table who can’t say “Please.”

  IT IS SO EASY TO GIVE IN

  I have been thinking about the man who gives in.

  Have you heard about him? In his story

  A twenty-eight-foot pine meets a small wind

  And the pine bends all the way over to the ground.

  “I was persuaded,” the pine says. “It was convincing.”

  A mouse visits a cat, and the cat agrees

  To drown all her children. “What could I do?”

  The cat said. “The mouse needed that.”

  It’s strange. I’ve heard that some people conspire

  In their own ruin. A fool says, “You don’t

  Deserve to live.” The man says, “I’ll string this rope

  Over that branch, maybe you can find a box.”

  The Great One with her necklace of skulls says,

  “I need twenty thousand corpses.” “Tell you what,”

  The General says, “we have an extra battalion

  Over there on the hill. We don’t need all these men.”

  WANTING MORE APPLAUSE AT A CONFERENCE

  It’s something about envy. I won’t say I’m envious,

  But I did have certain moods when I was two.

  Now of course I can’t remember any of that.

  I’m happy if another receives some praise or attention

  That’s really mine. I talk, and the man next to me

  Talks, and he gets the applause. Or I am confused

  And she makes sense. This is hard to bear.

  I bear it, but it causes trouble inside the den.

  Is it a mammal problem then? Six teats are palpable

  Far inside the wiry fur, and I want more

  Than one? Is that it? It is, but such greed

  Is mainly a problem for small mammals,

  And I am no longer small. Let’s call it a mood

  When we can’t remember. Let’s call it a habit

  Of opening the mouth when we, who have

  Much, want more, even what belongs to the poor.

  CALLING YOUR FATHER

  There was a boy who never got enough.

  You know what I mean. Something

  In him longed to find the big

  Mother, and he leaped into the sea.

  It took a while, but a whale

  Agreed to swallow him.

  He knew it was wrong, but once

  Past the baleen, it was too late.

  It’s OK. There’s a curved library

  Inside, and those high

  Ladders. People take requests.

  It’s like the British Museum.

  One needs a fire to get out.

  Maybe it was the romance

  Novels he burned. Smoke curls

  Up the whale’s gorge. She coughs.

  And that’s it. The boy swims to shore;

  It’s a fishing town in Alaska.

  He calls his father. “I’m here.

  Let me tell you a story.”

  THINKING ABOUT OLD JOBS

  Well, let’s say this morning is all of life there is—

  Let’s suppose the weather (rainy), the room

  (Creamy-walled), the bed (soft), your cells (calm,

  Excitable and dense) are it. Don’t expect more.

  Then what? Does it matter how you chose

  To live at twenty? You felt detached, let’s say,

  So you blew your legs and arms off.

  Why feel bad? It helped in some ways.

  You had more solitude, because friends avoid stumps.

  Of course you had to live. You started picking

  Other people’s cucumbers with your teeth,

  As you lay flat on a board. Don’t be ashamed.

  It was a deal. It worked. The boss’s children

  Later sent
you back the canceled contract.

  Then remember the job you had lying about

  Your health to life insurance companies?

  Or performing as a Santa in Depression wards?

  All those jobs were all right. But that time is over.

  Am I content? I am. But we don’t

  Have to live in the way we did then: Let’s talk.

  CONVERSATION WITH A MONSTER

  A man I knew could never say who he was.

  You know people like that. When he met a monster,

  He’d encourage the monster to talk about eating

  But failed to say that he objected to being prey.

  A day goes by; a week; a month; it’s summer.

  The adolescent wolverines go out scouting;

  Crabs lift their claws; the praying mantises

  Get religious. This man keeps trying to adapt.

 

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