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Collected Poems

Page 26

by Robert Bly


  Idea that the gods are dead.

  You were so rash. I’d play saying

  The gods have died, but I’d never say it.

  If they’re gone, only Imagination

  Can replace them. That’s you.

  We’ll have to come to you, where

  You stand in your Hartford garden,

  Looking and lolling and longing

  Like a girl in a white dress.

  TASTING HEAVEN

  Some people say that every poem should have

  God in it somewhere. But of course Wallace Stevens

  Wasn’t one of those. We live, he said, “in a world

  Without heaven to follow.” Shall we agree

  That we taste heaven only once, when we see

  Her at fifteen walking among falling leaves?

  It’s possible. And yet as Stevens lay dying

  He invited the priest in. There, I’ve said it.

  The priest is not an argument, only an instance.

  But our gusty emotions say to me that we have

  Tasted heaven many times: these delicacies

  Are left over from some larger party.

  WALLACE STEVENS IN THE FOURTH GRADE

  Where a voice that is great within us rises up,

  As we stand gazing at the rounded moon.

  —Wallace Stevens

  In the fourth grade he sat on his school bench

  Daydreaming. He was already admiring his voice

  That he hadn’t found. And later on the lawn

  He spent hours standing at the edge of Hartford

  Looking at the moon. That is where his voice was,

  Far up there, in air, near the rounded moon.

  He knew the moon was made of clogged magma,

  And volcanic rinsings, and punk and dog poop.

  That was all right. That was better. It was more

  Like us. The rogue moon couldn’t hold God

  Any longer; we’ll have to make do with waltzes,

  And Florida and those prancing white horses.

  There is no Divine; there are only Viennese horses,

  And ordinary evenings and houses. Things have changed.

  The boy on the bench can become in poems a god.

  THE WALTZ

  One man I know keeps saying that we don’t need

  Heaven. He thinks embroidered Russian

  Wedding blouses will take the place of angels,

  Or windy nights when the crows fly up in front

  Of your car will replace all the Psalmists.

  He wants us to dance high-hearted, like the Bacchae,

  Even if it’s a waltz. It’s a little awkward;

  But if you practice, he says, you can do it.

  The hard thing is to try to figure out how

  To say goodbye—even just going to the grocery.

  V

  THE NEURONS WHO WATCH BIRDS

  We have to think now what it would be like

  To be old. Some funny little neurons,

  Developed for high-speed runners, and quick-

  Handed bowmen, begin to get tired. They fire

  But then lay down their bows and watch birds.

  The kidney cells—“Too much thinking!” the Chinese

  Say—look around for help, but the kids have

  All gone to the city. Your friends get hit by lightning,

  And your enemies live on. This isn’t going to get

  Better. Crows yelling from the telephone wires

  Don’t include you in the stories they tell, and they seem

  To remember some story that you haven’t heard.

  What can you do? We’ll have to round up

  All those little people wandering about

  In the body, get them to sit up straight, and study

  This problem: How do we die?

  A QUESTION THE BUNDLE HAD

  When summer was nearly over,

  The bundles would stand in the stubble

  Whispering. One said: “For a while,

  It looked like I might get away.

  “I could have done it—

  No one would have noticed.

  But it was hard to know

  If I should go singly, or with others.”

  Each of us resembles that

  Bundle. For years we waited

  For the right moment to escape.

  Perhaps it was that moment in July

  When the thunder came. But the next

  Day it was too late. And we

  Ended up in the thresher.

  Were we right to wait?

  SEEING THE ECLIPSE IN MAINE

  It started about noon. On top of Mount Batte,

  We were all exclaiming. Someone had a cardboard

  And a pin, and we all cried out when the sun

  Appeared in tiny form on the notebook cover.

  It was hard to believe. The high school teacher

  We’d met called it a camera obscura,

  People in the Renaissance loved to make them.

  Later, when only a sliver was left of the sun,

  Light passing through the branches of a fir

  Made dozens of crescents all by itself,

  Thousands! Even our straw hats produced a few

  As we moved them over the bare granite.

  We shared chocolate, and one man from Maine

  Told a joke. Suns were everywhere at our feet.

  CLOTHESPINS

  I’d like to have spent my life making

  Clothespins. Nothing would be harmed,

  Except some pines, probably on land

  I owned and would replant. I’d see

  My work on clotheslines near some lake,

  Up north on a day in October,

  Perhaps twelve clothespins, the pine

  Still fresh, and the fall wind blowing.

  THE FACE IN THE TOYOTA

  Suppose you see a face in a Toyota

  One day, and you fall in love with that face,

  And it is Her, and the world rushes by

  Like dust blown down a Montana street.

  And you fall upward into some deep hole,

  And you can’t tell God from a grain of sand.

  And your life is changed, except that now you

  Overlook even more than you did before;

  And these ignored things come to bury you,

  And you are crushed, and your parents

  Can’t help anymore, and the woman in the Toyota

  Becomes a part of the world that you don’t see.

  And now the grain of sand becomes sand again,

  And you stand on some mountain road weeping.

  THE SCANDAL

  The day the minister ran off with the choir director

  The bindlestiffs felt some gaiety in their arms.

  Spike-pitchers threw their bundles higher on the load

  And the County Assessor drove with a tiny smile.

  Actually the minister’s wife felt relieved that morning,

  Though afraid too. She walked out by the slough,

  And admired the beaver’s house, partly above

  Water, partly beneath. That seemed right.

  The minister felt dizzy as the two of them drove

  For hours: country music and the loose ribbon

  Mingled in his mind with the Song of Songs.

  They stopped at a small motel near Bismarck.

  For the threshers, the stubble was still dry,

  The oat dust itchy, the big belt needed grease,

  The loads pulled up to the machine. This story happens

  Over and over, and it’s a good story.

  LOOKING AT THE STARS

  I still think about the shepherds, how many stars

  They saw. We owe our love of God to these sheep

  That had to be followed, or companioned, all night.

  One can’t just let them run. By midnight

  The stars had already become huge talkers.

  The Par
ent sits in her proud Chair, and is punished.

  The Dog follows the Hunter. Each time a story ends

  There is such a long pause before another begins.

  Those of us who are parents, and getting older,

  Long, as tonight, for our children to stand

  With us, looking at the stars. Here it is,

  Eight thousand years later, and I still remember.

  AFTER A FRIEND’S DEATH

  For Orrin

  It must be summer. Push the dock out,

  Bring the canoe down, find your old

  Books—bird books, Hawthorne. Drive

  To Gooseberry. Even in the Swedish islands,

  Summer comes. They pull the linen off chairs,

  Bring out the blue dishes, write some poems.

  Say again: “It must be summer.”

  Even though people die, it must be summer.

  THE PARCEL

  It’s a parcel of some sort. The exchange

  Takes place at night. Sometimes

  Dark spots show on the brown wrapping paper,

  Because rain was falling.

  It happened. The two had met each other only

  Yesterday. Neither had read many novels;

  They didn’t plot this. It had something to do with the planets,

  With destiny, with rain.

  Because it happened, certain gates were shut;

  A door opened. Children were born; one died.

  How could we call it innocent? The rain

  Was innocent.

  Do you remember the night of that exchange?

  Some forces wanted this to happen.

  The rain didn’t care, but no one else

  Was innocent.

  MY DOUBTS ON GOING TO VISIT A NEW FRIEND

  I’m glad that a white horse grazes in that meadow

  Outside your kitchen window; even when it rains

  There’s still someone there. And it rains often

  In the mountains.

  I have to ask myself what kind of friend I can be.

  You’ll want to know whether I do dishes,

  Or know my share of stories, or any Wallace

  Stevens poems by heart.

  I know that I won’t talk all the time, or steal

  Money, or complain about my room,

  Or undermine you, or speak disparagingly

  Of your family.

  I am afraid there’ll be a moment when

  I fail you, friend; I will turn slightly

  Away, our eyes will not meet, and out in the field

  There will be no one.

  For John

  ONE SOURCE OF BAD INFORMATION

  There’s a boy in you about three

  Years old who hasn’t learned a thing for thirty

  Thousand years. Sometimes it’s a girl.

  This child had to make up its mind

  How to save you from death. He said things like:

  “Stay home. Avoid elevators. Eat only elk.”

  You live with this child, but you don’t know it.

  You’re in the office, yes, but live with this boy

  At night. He’s uninformed, but he does want

  To save your life. And he has. Because of this boy

  You survived a lot. He’s got six big ideas.

  Five don’t work. Right now he’s repeating them to you.

  THOUGHTS

  There’s something dangerous

  In being with good talkers.

  The fly’s stories of his ancestors

  Don’t mean much to the frog.

  I can’t be the noisy person I am

  If you don’t stop talking.

  Some people talk so brilliantly

  That we get small and vanish.

  The shadows near that Dutch woman

  Tell you that Rembrandt is a good listener.

  THE GRANDPARENT AND THE GRANDDAUGHTER

  “Will you rescue her?” We have dreams like that

  When a grandchild is about to be born.

  We’re called upon and we have to help.

  I dreamt that a baby had fallen off a cliff

  Into the water. The baby’s mouth was opening

  And closing. I climbed fast, hand over

  Hand down to the shore and pulled her in.

  She was all right! That’s how I did my part.

  THE OCEAN RISING AND FALLING

  Each fall it rains a lot in the northern woods.

  Many parts of our brain hear the rain;

  And one part says, “Oh good. Let’s sleep.”

  Another says, “A visitor is coming. It’s

  A sign!” The oldest brain says: “If that person

  Doesn’t look like us, we’ll stone him.” I guess

  It’s family. The cedar trees mutter,

  “About time.” Some forest streams

  Are amazed to be noticed. Rivers, the big ones, are sure

  They deserve it. Only the ocean pays no

  Attention, being past all that. The ocean just

  Goes up and down saying, “I need no more.”

  OCEAN RAIN AND MUSIC

  Rain falls on the shore bushes and the pawky sea

  Lettuce, as if it were rain from some other century,

  Rain that arrived with the sailing ships,

  A steady rain that came out of the Indian Ocean

  Along with so much music. Well then, since I speak

  So affectionately, is it music that has saved me?

  Did music become my mother? Music cannot

  Close doors, nor keep murderers out.

  Some children need to be safe, but most aren’t.

  Children get born in our world, but who protects them?

  A few find gypsy wagons and hide there.

  The tribe steals them away, and they are gone, for now.

  I thought to leave with a gypsy troupe in my twenties.

  Someone did take me away. I had heard

  Rumors of heroism. Yeats stole me away.

  We leave family and community and never

  Get back. But one has to get used to being stolen.

  And there are certain secrets that stolen children know.

  VI

  LOOKING AT AGING FACES

  Some faces get older and remain who they are. Oh

  You can see disappointment there, where parent-teacher

  Meetings have affected the chin; or the nose got pushed

  To one side by deaths. So many things happen:

  People move away, or your mother becomes crazy

  And bites the nurse.

  Each face had a long time in the womb to decide

  How much it would let worldly things affect it,

  How often it would turn toward the wall or the woods,

  So it didn’t have to be seen, how much

  It would give in, how stubbornly it would

  Hold its own.

  Some faces remain whole and radiant. We study them

  To find a clue. Aunt Nettie said, “My father

  Put on cufflinks every day.” Memories like that

  Help. One face, as firmly profiled as a hawk,

  Used to say: “The world is fair, and if it’s not,

  I think it is.”

  For some of us, insults sink in, or the feet

  Inherit two roads and lose the way; for others, cold

  And hunger come. Some faces change. It’s not wrong.

  And if you look carefully, you can see,

  By glimpsing us just after we wake,

  Who we are.

  For Bill and Nancy

  NOVEMBER

  Some aggravations include the whole world.

  What can you do? An old pulp-cutter

  Longs to die, imagines

  The Easter nails.

  On his Icelandic farm, Guttorm hears

  The news: his two sons

  Dead. He pulls the covers

  Up over his head.

  Some oak leaves hang, others f
all.

  The body says, “It’s all right

  To die. It’s not an insult

  To the world.”

  THREE-DAY FALL RAIN

  The three-day

  October rain blows

  Leaves down. We knew

  That life wouldn’t last long.

  The dock gleams

  With oak leaves, cold

  Leaves in the boat, leaves

  Spotted in the old man grass.

  Hardy warned

  Us. Jesus in his boat,

  Standing, his back turned,

  Being rowed to the other shore.

  WINTER AFTERNOON BY THE LAKE

  For Owen

  Black trunks, black branches, and white snow.

  No one nearby, five o’clock, below zero,

 

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