by Robert Bly
Shiloh was like a drug that hid secretly
Among the rough leaves on the Natchez Trace.
All the drinkers wanted it, and fell asleep.
We value addition and subtraction too much.
Ten thousand Newtons wrapping their equations
Around the serpent’s tail can’t replace a single lover.
The sunfish flashes light to the reeds below.
Moonlight slips inside the oyster’s closed eyes.
The Light of Heaven widens the frog’s mouth.
The bobber floats in the shadowy weeds.
But a dark Hook hangs farther down.
There is nothing on that hook but “Farewell.”
WHEN WE BECAME LOVERS
Do you laugh or cry when you hear the poet sing?
“Out of the first warmth of the spring, and out
Of the shine of the hemlocks . . .” It’s the hemlocks then,
Swaying above the grasses in the cemetery,
That encourage us in our affair with the world.
We have secret meetings with moss at night.
When the night-singer sang, did you notice the mice
Going by? They leave tracks like the setting stars.
Haven’t you heard the grunting of the hollyhocks,
Bringing forth their hairy life by the widow’s door?
Gravestones gather up the stray tufts of time
That wind would otherwise scatter in the fields.
You and I have been in love with the moon
Rising for a long time, ever since the day
Our mothers took our hands in the spring field.
That was the day we heard the cry of the hemlocks.
We became lovers then; and our road was decided.
We laughed and cried over the warmth of the spring.
MONET’S HAYSTACKS
It’s strange that our love of Beauty should lead us to hell.
I caught one glimpse of you, and a moment later
My house and books were all thrown into the fire.
Plato wrote by the light from sharks’ teeth.
There is always terror near the Quiet Garden.
If we have come to a bad end, let’s blame beauty.
The horses of sorrow are always restless, breaking
Out of fences, trampling the neighbors’ garden.
The best odes are written by pirates in the moonlight.
When Monet glimpsed the haystack shining in fall dawn,
Knowing that despair and reason live in the same house,
He cried out: “I have loved God!” And he had.
I walked down the aisles of the grocery weeping.
Gleams of light came off my hair when I saw you
And I found myself instantly under the horses’ hooves.
My improvidence was to have been too hopeful.
My improvidence was not to see the fall.
I apologize to those in hell for my disturbances.
WHAT KEPT HORACE ALIVE
Men and women spend only a moment in Paradise.
The two lovers watch Charlie Chaplin eat his shoe,
And a moment later find themselves barefooted in the grave.
I know that I wanted more than two years with you.
If my wife had been able to absorb more cruelty,
Perhaps I could have paid the fiery angels to go away.
The dead man lies in bed with his great toe
Sticking up; it is because of his toe
That he could carry the burden of marriage so long.
Sometimes I frighten that boy who sleeps on the ground.
He keeps his head in his arms; all he smells is the hair
That is left behind when the groundhog is eaten.
There are as many groundhogs as there are stars.
Wherever there is a lot of anything, we are in trouble.
It is the generosity of snowflakes that leads us to suicide.
The bats’ wings are the Saviours of the mosquitoes;
And the cod long for the net. It was only the certainty
Of death that kept Horace alive so long.
THE LOVE FROM FAR AWAY
We have a longing for the mud on riverbanks,
And for the wet earth around growing carrots.
When Jaufre Rudel spoke of the love from far away,
He was already bathing his head in lion’s blood.
He wasn’t that crazy about freedom! He cried out,
“I want to be held prisoner by the Arabs!”
The mourning dove is so well named; its brief call
Rises out of Eternity on a thin ash branch;
And the mother reaches for her son in the silence.
The moment the dove caught one glimpse of the Face,
The hollyhocks rooted themselves in the ground.
Only rooted oysters are able to produce pearls.
Swimmers, when they dive to the pool-floor,
Turn sometimes and look up toward the sky;
They see sunlight killing its bulls in the water.
“Cry out when your feet touch the bottom! We’ll
Follow the bubbles down to where you are.” Even
Underwater we can hear the mourning dove.
II
EUDALIA AND PLATO
The Dutch have been growing tulips since 1500.
There are eight thousand tulips in one Dutch field.
Every century is full of lovers; so it’s not to worry.
Clouds drift over the sea when the wind blows.
Dickens knew there are lovers even in the Law Courts—
The lovers without lawyers receive vast settlements.
The lovers’ books are always open to Inspection.
We can see Romeo and Juliet in the tomb,
And paintings of tiny ships in Divine Waters.
Always the lover’s body is saving and spending.
During the day its donkey gathers thousands of pearls.
Then at night it spends all that the earth has saved.
Eudalia will not allow Plato to come near
The Garden of Lovers because Eudalia knows
He, being lofty, is afraid of the glory of ruin.
I know how much ruin love can bring.
But at night I hang around the orchard
Hoping to catch one breath from the lovers’ tree.
THE TRAP-DOOR
Men and women spend only a moment in Paradise.
Then a trap-door sends them down to the Lords of Misreason,
Where baby kangaroos carry us all off in their small pouches.
Let’s all praise the saints who never mention God!
Why should the Leghorn family praise the Knife-Grinder?
I don’t think it’s right for water to assist the grindstone, either.
The walls of my poetry house are splashed with blood.
I don’t want to be inward. Every day a thousand mice
Run out of my door heading for Tennyson’s house.
Arabs with big eyes studied all night for years
And translated the Tablets of the Alchemists.
They could pull Mercury from the knees of the wind.
Jabir the Brilliant at fourteen could arrange
Sounds so they became holy. Friends, each day
I crawl over and kiss some of the books I love.
It is because the lovers have been exiled
To the nonexistence of the onion fields
That the pauper wakes up playing the flute of gratitude.
HANNIBAL AND ROBESPIERRE
We saw new ice in the ruts on the way to school.
Once I saw through the ice, even dying sheep
Could not convince me that the world is not right.
Sometimes ears of corn were left hanging
On the stalks. The picker had missed them. Those ears
Lay touching the ground the whole winter.
The dove’s drunken call rising from the orchard<
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Where the young lambs stood near their mothers
Convinced me to throw in my lot with the dust.
I hope you’ve stopped saying that people
Are bad and animals good. Bees have their hives.
Every old frog is a son of Robespierre.
Our joy was ruined anyway long ago
For the sake of order; the boy’s and girl’s Delight
Would still be bound even if Rousseau got his way.
Hannibal’s elephants never got back to Africa.
We know that the world loses many things. But
Even wars don’t mean that the world is wrong.
WALKING BACKWARD
Friends, there is only one joy and hundreds of sorrows.
We live down here in the Abode of Smelly Bones
Near the widow’s door, near Whitman’s retarded brother.
Even though it’s dawn on the rooftops, it’s still night
Here, among cabbages and shoats, among
Glints from the wings of the mice-seeking owls.
Sometimes milk makes us afraid. Savonarola
Was uncomfortable in a strawberry patch,
And Aristotle was uneasy beside the generous sea.
Mother’s milk is what frightened both
The Italians and the Greeks. A drop of milk
Creates a crown when it falls back into milk.
The Sumerians, pressing their stylus into wet clay,
Found their way to the sites of their great
White-walled cities by the smell of milk.
In our messy world, we all walk backward,
Each holding a potato that points to the grave.
The night of infidelity and longing goes on forever.
WANTING TO STEAL TIME
People are moving big milk cans around in
The storeroom, and I am there. Each day I move
Barrels full of nothing to a different spot.
I want to charge you for the rust marks on my pants.
When greed comes by, I hitch a ride on the truck.
You’ll see nothing but my backside for miles.
Every noon as the clock hands arrive at twelve,
I want to tie the two arms together,
And walk out of the bank carrying time in bags.
Don’t bother to associate poets with saints
Or extraordinary beings. People like us have already
Hired someone to weep for our parents.
We have a taste for ignorance, and a fondness
For the mediocre dressed up as fame. We love
To go with Gogol looking for dead souls.
Counting up the twelve syllables in a line
Could make us allies of the stern Egyptians
Whose armies were swallowed by the Red Sea.
CALDERÓN
Each mole and shoat is a shadow thrown by the sun.
Each muskrat, each badger, each hedgehog is a shadow.
That’s why they can hide so well in the leaves.
Don’t comfort me by putting flowers in my room.
Don’t quote me the secret poems of Calderón.
Don’t mention freedom in the execution room.
Each day I awake, the Lord of Greed senses
A new way to put my head down on the desk.
At a wedding I envy even the minister.
Whichever room I am in, he wants me to be
First, and I agree. So many injustices
Have come into the world through me.
The burning of monasteries is built into
Our world. In every great city you’ll find
A Roman general living near Lucretia’s house.
There are so many different designs of the snowflake.
There are so many halibut caught in the net.
There are so many salmon tails touching in the dark.
THE WAGON AND THE CLIFF
The pin fails, and the wagon goes over the cliff.
The doctor steps out a moment and the boy dies.
We might question Emerson about this moment.
Please don’t imagine that only people are greedy.
When a crow lifts off, its ungainly wings
Can carry a thousand Mandelas to the Island.
Hippolytus resisted women a little too much
And the Lady of the Sea decided against him.
His horses agreed to drag him along the stones.
Mourning doves singing from the fenceposts
When I was a boy woke the whole countryside.
But a dove’s breastbone is a cathedral of desire.
Sometimes the saints make us seem better than we are.
Our ancestors, on their passport photos, knew
The sound of a bird being pushed out of its nest.
Because I’ve become accustomed to failure,
Some smoke of sadness blows off these poems.
These poems are windows blown open by winter wind.
FORGIVING THE MAILMAN
Let’s celebrate another day lost to Eternity.
Minute by minute we eke out the story.
But the spider is on his way from night to night.
The mailman is not the one who ruins our life.
Wind has an affair with a million grains of sand.
Each sand grain has more power than Xerxes.
During those months while we slept in the womb,
The Demiurge gave us a taste for war
So that we were born mortgaged and howling.
Madame Bovary could not endure the good life.
She was like us: she wanted disgraceful nights,
Torn clothes, and the inconstant heart.
Our impoverishment follows naturally from our wealth.
The pain that man and wife feel at breakfast
Each day goes back to decisions in Heaven.
What will you say to Mahler about his daughter
Who died young? There were closed carriages in Vienna.
Freud tried to cure the insufficiency of our sorrow.
THE WAY THE PARROT LEARNS
I’m afraid to talk to you about my little toe,
Because I know that it will never agree to fasting.
The only ally I have is the sole of my foot.
We all live close to our greedy souls.
We have inherited so many longings
That in the other world our name is “So Many.”
One teaspoon of envy was enough for me
To attack Robert Lowell; with a tablespoon
I could have taken on Henry James and Abelard.
Trainers once placed a parrot before a mirror,
And a man behind. The parrot, assuming
A parrot was speaking, would learn to talk.
Perhaps if God would put up a mirror
And sit behind it, and talk, I could believe
That those words of mercy were coming from me.
Why should the rooster go over every detail
Of his beheading? Let’s leave some darkness
Around those days when we danced in the road.
REMBRANDT’S PORTRAIT OF TITUS WITH A RED HAT
It’s enough for light to fall on one half of a face.
Let the other half belong to the restful shadow,
The shadow the bowl of bread throws on the altar.
Some paintings are like a horse’s eating place
At the back of the barn where a single beam
Of light comes down from a crack in the ceiling.
Painting bright colors may lie about the world.
Too many windows cause the artist to hide.
Too many well-lit necks call for the axe.
Beneath his red hat, Titus’s eyes hint to us
How puzzled he is by the sweetness of the world—
The way the dragonfly hurries to its death.
So many forces want to kill the young
Male who has been blessed. The Holy Family
Has
to hide many times on the way to Egypt.
Titus receives a scattering of darkness.
He’s baptized by water soaked in onions;
The father protects his son by washing him in the night.
III
NIKOS AND HIS DONKEY
Let’s tell the sweet story about the day Nikos,
Wandering around with his donkey and saddlebags,
Turned up one day at a farm of Godseekers.
The Godseekers all came out when he knocked.
