Selected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945–2005 9780520940949, 9780520251960

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The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by the Humanities Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.

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Also by Robert Creeley POETRY

COLLECTIONS AND SELECTIONS

For Love Words The Charm Pieces A Day Book Hello: A Journal Later Mirrors Memory Gardens Windows Echoes Life & Death If I were writing this On Earth

Collected Poems: 1975–2005 Collected Poems: 1945–1975 Selected Poems So There: Poems 1976–1983 Just in Time: Poems 1984–1994 Collected Essays Collected Prose

FICTION

The Gold Diggers The Island Mabel: A Story DRAMA

Listen ESSAYS AND INTERVIEWS

A Quick Graph Contexts of Poetry: Interviews 1961–1971 Was That a Real Poem & Other Essays Autobiography Tales Out of School Day Book of a Virtual Poet

LETTERS

Charles Olson and Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence Irving Layton and Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence AS EDITOR

The Black Mountain Review, 1954–1957 New American Story (with Donald M. Allen) The New Writing in the U.S.A. (with Donald M. Allen) Selected Writings of Charles Olson Whitman: Selected by Robert Creeley The Essential Burns Charles Olson, Selected Poems Best American Poetry, 2002 George Oppen, Selected Poems

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SELECTED COLLABORATIONS AND ARTIST’S BOOKS

The Immoral Proposition (with René Laubiès) All That Is Lovely in Men (with Dan Rice) 123456789 (with Arthur Okamura) A Sight (with R.B. Kitaj) A Day Book (with R.B. Kitaj) Numbers (with Robert Indiana) The Class of ’47 (with Joe Brainard) Presences: A Text for Marisol (with Marisol) Thirty Things (with Bobbie Louise Hawkins) Away (with Bobbie Louise Hawkins) Mabel: A Story (with Jim Dine) 7&6 (with Robert Therrien and Michel Butor) Parts (with Susan Rothenberg) Famous Last Words (with John Chamberlain) Gnomic Verses (with Cletus Johnson) Visual Poetics (with Donald Sultan) It (with Francesco Clemente) Life & Death (with Francesco Clemente) There (with Francesco Clemente) Edges (with Alex Katz) The Dogs of Auckland (with Max Gimblett) Signs (with Georg Baselitz) En Famille (with Elsa Dorfman) Drawn & Quartered (with Archie Rand) Tandoori Satori (with Francesco Clemente)

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Selected Poems, 1945–2005

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Robert Creeley Selected Poems, 1945–2005

Edited by Benjamin Friedlander

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDON

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University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. Every effort has been made to identify and locate the rightful copyright holders of all material not specifically commissioned for use in this publication and to secure permission, where applicable, for reuse of all such material. Credit, if and as available, has been provided for all borrowed material either on-page, on this copyright page, or in the credits section of the book. Errors, omissions, or failure to obtain authorization with respect to material copyrighted by other sources has been either unavoidable or unintentional. The editor and publisher welcome any information that would allow them to correct future reprints. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2008 by The Regents of the University of California For acknowledgment of previous publication, please see credits, page 329. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Creeley, Robert, 1926 – 2005. [Poems. Selections] Selected poems, 1945 – 2005 / Robert Creeley ; edited by Benjamin Friedlander. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-520-25195-3 (alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-520-25196-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) I. Friedlander, Benjamin, 1959– II. Title. PS3505.R43A6

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Contents List of Illustrations / xv Introduction / 1

From The Charm Guido, i’ vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io / 41 The Surf: An Elegy /42 A Variation / 43 The Charm / 44 The Method of Actuality / 44 The Revelation / 45 Chasing the Bird / 45 The Changes / 46 For Somebody’s Marriage / 46 Stomping with Catullus / 47 “To Work Is to Contradict Contradictions, to Do Violence to Natural Violence . . .” / 48 Not Again / 49 In a Boat Shed / 50 The Sentence / 50 The Ear / 51

From For Love Hart Crane / 51 The Crisis / 53 The Innocence / 54 The Ball Game / 54 After Lorca / 55 The Dishonest Mailmen / 56 The Immoral Proposition / 56 The Conspiracy / 57 I Know a Man / 57 The Death of Venus / 58

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The Lover / 58 The Business / 59 The Disappointment / 59 The Warning / 60 Naughty Boy / 60 The Whip / 61 A Form of Women / 62 The Friend / 63 Please / 64 Oh No / 65 A Wicker Basket / 65 A Marriage / 66 Ballad of the Despairing Husband / 67 Damon & Pythias / 69 If You / 69 The Invoice / 70 And / 71 Heroes / 71 Going to Bed / 72 The Flower / 73 The Hill / 74 Kore / 74 The Rain / 75 Midnight / 76 The Song / 77 The Cracks / 77 Jack’s Blues / 78 The Sign Board / 79 The End of the Day / 80 For Fear / 80 Mind’s Heart / 81 Love Comes Quietly / 82 After Mallarmé / 82 For Love / 83

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From Words The Rhythm / 85 The Mountains in the Desert / 86 For W. C. W. / 87 For No Clear Reason / 87 The Messengers / 88 I / 89 Something / 90 The Language / 91 The Window / 92 The Pattern / 93 Some Afternoon / 94 Anger / 95 Some Place / 101 Fancy / 102 Words / 103 A Reason / 104 A Sight / 105 The Hole / 107 A Picture / 110 A Piece / 110 They (2) / 111 The Farm / 111

From Pieces “As real as thinking . . .” / 111 The Family / 113 The Finger / 114 Numbers / 119 Diction / 132 America / 132 Place / 133 3 in 1 / 134 Again / 134 Ice Cream / 135 Four / 136

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From A Day Book “We’ll die . . .” / 137 The Teachings / 138 “The men in my life were . . .” / 139 Thinking / 139 “You will never be here . . .” / 141 “Do You Think . . .” / 141 The Act of Love / 143 The Tiger / 145 The Birds / 146 Sounds / 147 People / 148 Massachusetts / 154 Rain / 155 Mouths Nuzz / 156 Billfold / 157

From Thirty Things The Temper / 157 Characteristically / 157 Hey / 158 As We Sit / 158 Kitchen / 159 Here / 159 Echo / 159 Xmas Poem: Bolinas / 160 Place / 160 One Day / 160

From Backwards Thinking / 161 Backwards / 161

From Away Here / 161 For My Mother: Genevieve Jules Creeley / 162

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The Plan Is the Body / 166 Falling / 167 Phone / 168

From Hello Sit Down / 168 So There / 169 Cebu / 172 Morning / 175 Hong Kong Window / 175 Things to Do in Tokyo / 177 There / 180 Out Here / 181

From Later Flaubert’s Early Prose / 183 Love / 184 Erotica / 184 End / 186 I Love You / 187 Theresa’s Friends / 187 Later / 188 The Place / 196 Desultory Days / 197

From Mirrors First Rain / 201 Time / 202 Self-Portrait / 203 Mother’s Voice / 204 Oh Love / 205 The Movie Run Backward / 206 Bresson’s Movies / 206 Beyond / 207 Sad Advice / 208 If / 209

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Buffalo Evening / 209 Winter / 210 Oh / 210 Oh Max / 211

From Memory Gardens Heaven Knows / 216 Hotel / 216 Religion / 217 Massachusetts May / 217 Memories / 218 Echo / 218 Wall / 218 Après Anders / 220 Knock Knock / 223

From Windows Song / 223 Stairway to Heaven / 224 Ho Ho / 225 H’s / 225 Plague / 226 Age / 227 Oh / 230 Eight Plus / 231 “Ever Since Hitler . . .” / 235 Thinking / 236 The Drunks of Helsinki / 237 Helsinki Window / 238

From Echoes Echo / 242 Pure / 242 It / 243 Chain / 244 Body / 244

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Your / 246 Gnomic Verses / 246 Dutch Boy / 254 The Road / 255

From Life & Death Histoire de Florida / 256 Credo / 272 Old Story / 275 Goodbye / 275 The Dogs of Auckland / 277

From If I were writing this The Way / 285 (Lemons) Pear Appears / 286 En Famille / 286 Conversion to Her / 290 Clemente’s Images / 292 As If / 300 Pictures / 300 Supper / 306 “If I were writing this . . .” / 307 Emptiness / 309

From On Earth When I think / 310 “To think . . .” / 311 Old Song / 312 Bye and Bye / 312 Caves / 313 On Earth / 318 Old Story / 319 Notes / 321 Credits / 329 Index of Titles and First Lines / 331

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Illustrations 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

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Two-page spread from Pieces (1969) / 12 Two-page spread from Hello (1978) / 14 Hannah Creeley touching an inlaid granite slab from the Robert Creeley–James Surls collaboration Once There Was a Forest (1991) / 19 The final six quatrains of “So There” in Robert Creeley’s notebook / 20 CD covers from Robert Creeley’s reading of his poetry / 22 The conclusion to “The Act of Love” alongside a monoprint by Bobbie Louise Hawkins, from St. Martin’s (1971) / 24 Two-page spread from The Dogs of Auckland (1998), including drawing by Max Gimblett / 26 Elsa Dorfman photograph of William, Penelope, Robert, and Hannah Creeley, for En Famille: A Poem (1999) / 28 Elsa Dorfman photograph of Ruth and Marion Sittler, for En Famille / 29

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Introduction ROBERT CREELEY WAS BORN in Arlington, Massachusetts, in 1926, and grew up in rural West Acton. His father’s side of the family was well established in the state, but Creeley was raised in closer proximity to his mother’s people, who came from Maine. When he was four, his father died of pneumonia. This was followed closely by the removal of Creeley’s left eye, injured by shattered glass a few years before, and by the straitened circumstance of the Great Depression. His mother, a nurse, kept care of the family—Creeley had an older sister—and his mother’s character, his mother’s habits, necessarily left a strong imprint on his own. (“My cheekbones resonate/with her emphasis,” he writes in “Mother’s Voice” [204– 5].) Influential also were the losses and uncertainties, the drop in status, which left their mark in patterns of thought, attitude, and behavior. The trajectory of Creeley’s adult life, his travels, employments, friendships, households, and loves, is but one trace of a deeper restlessness also recorded in his work—or so it is tempting to think given Creeley’s enduring fascination with contingency and his frequent return, in writing and conversation, to the biographical facts cited above. Yet the import of a fact is never a fact. Life itself is, like writing, an act of interpretation. “Whatever is presumed of a life that designs it as a fixture of social intent, or form of family, or the effect of an overwhelming event, has little bearing here, even if one might in comfortable hindsight say that it all followed.”1 Disjunction, indeed, played an important role for Creeley—his refusals were often as important as what he embraced. A year after entering Harvard, he joined the American Field Service to drive an ambulance in Burma, and although he returned to Harvard after the war ended (becoming part of the editorial group around the Wake), he would leave for good in 1947, only a few credits shy of his degree. By this time Creeley was married, and soon after he and his wife were living in isolation near Littleton, New Hampshire. There, his commitment to writing deepened, inspired in large part by poets who had fallen or were falling out of favor— Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound. In these affections, and in his drift away from conventional success, he made the perfect collaborator for Charles Olson, with whom Creeley began a monumental corre-

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spondence (the first twelve months of their letters fill five volumes). Fifteen years Creeley’s senior, Olson too was a devoted reader of Crane, Williams, and Pound, and like Creeley he had dropped out of Harvard before completing his degree (in Olson’s case, a graduate degree). Out of their exchanges came Olson’s influential essay “Projective Verse” (1950), which incorporated Creeley’s dictum “form is never more than an extension of content.” For Olson, Creeley was “the Figure of Outward”—outward in the same sense that a letter goes out, folded in its envelope, to share language and make connection across a gap in time and space. Communication and connection are dominant motifs in Creeley’s life, always existing, however, in dynamic relation to refusal, disjunction, interiority, and separation. Moving with his family to southern France in 1951, and then a year after to Majorca (where his marriage would eventually disintegrate, an event chronicled in his novel The Island [1963]), Creeley became, paradoxically, more and more connected to other writers. In 1953, he and his wife, Ann MacKinnon, founded the Divers Press, publishing books of poetry and prose by himself, Olson, Paul Blackburn, Robert Duncan, Larry Eigner, Irving Layton, and others. That same year he began editing the Black Mountain Review, founded to advertise Black Mountain College, an experimental school in North Carolina where Olson was now rector and Creeley himself would soon be teaching.2 Visits to New York and San Francisco fueled this editorial work, establishing Creeley’s place in a network of writers given vivid representation in The New American Poetry (1960), a landmark anthology that featured work by poets associated with the Black Mountain, San Francisco, Beat, and New York School communities of writers and artists. Creeley, if anyone, was held in high esteem by all these groups, which, by the end of the 1960s, had emerged as a countercultural force; his earliest poems—collected in For Love (1962)—impressed readers far beyond his own circle with their lyricism, intensity, and craft, and made Creeley the most imitated love poet of his day. The evolutions of Creeley’s later practice exemplify the dynamic character of his writing overall: even at those moments when he seems most decisively to set aside or move beyond qualities or concerns of his earlier work, readers can discover points of continuity, so that even his radical shifts become part of a larger pattern of coherence and variation. The un-

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revised notebook writing of Pieces (1969)—deliberately minor and even antipoetic—appeared to many to abandon the self-exposure, sentiment, and skill of his previous Words (1967), but connects easily in retrospect to the reassertion of autobiography and feeling in A Day Book (1972). Moreover, by taking up in a new way the jazz-inspired improvisation of For Love, Pieces produced an altered relationship to the physical act of writing, such that Creeley’s natural tendency toward compression found welcome release in narrative force; the fluidity and grace of his late long poems give ample evidence of that. But Pieces is no simple transition work. An important influence on the language poets—an avant-garde group that took shape in the 1970s—it gives formal evidence of a more general openness to change that brought Creeley into increasing dialogue with younger poets arriving on the scene and made him such a passionate supporter of their work. Edward Dorn, Joanne Kyger, Tom Raworth, Tom Clark, Ted Berrigan, Robert Grenier, Anselm Hollo, John Taggart, Barrett Watten, Rosmarie Waldrop, Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, John Yau, Forrest Gander, Peter Gizzi, Lisa Jarnot—these and many more were sources of information, inspiration, friendship, as important to the ongoing story of his work as Olson, Blackburn, Duncan, Denise Levertov, and Allen Ginsberg. Creeley’s openness is also, in part, a sign of restlessness. Much of his adult life was spent in New Mexico, Bolinas, and Buffalo—Buffalo especially, where Creeley taught for thirty-seven years—but even while centered in these locations he would travel extensively, and sometimes for extended intervals. His New Mexico period (1956–69) was broken by two years in Guatemala (1959–61) and a shorter spell in British Columbia (1962–63); the early years of his teaching in Buffalo (1966–2003) overlapped with his last years in New Mexico and the entirety of his time in Bolinas, an artists’ enclave on the California coast (1970–76). In 1984, he established a residence in Waldoboro, Maine, where his sister lived; fellowships allowed for long stays in Berlin (1983) and Helsinki (1988–89); in 2003, he departed from Buffalo for Providence, Rhode Island. But the problem with a summary like this one is, it smoothes away the wrinkles that gave the years their character—the quick escapes, the reading tours, the short-term jobs, the displacements even within a fixed location.

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Creeley’s travels while living in Finland give a good indication of his wanderlust overall: Brussels, Liège, Prague, Olomouc, Brno, Berlin, Rostock, Jena, Paris, Budapest, Debrecen, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Trento, Rome, Milan, Turin, Genoa, Bologna, Messina, Salerno, Oslo, Warsaw, Poznan, Kraków, St. Petersburg, Riga, Umeå, Uppsala, Stockholm—a list that excludes his return trips for readings in the United States. It is not surprising, then, that Creeley’s poetry should be marked through and through by the places he has known, and also, on occasion, by the placelessness of modern travel. The best evidence of this is Hello (1978), the record of a trip across eight countries in nine weeks (New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea). Written at a moment of self-conscious transition—Creeley’s second marriage, to Bobbie Louise Hawkins, was coming to an end; “So There” (169–72) commemorates his first meeting with Penelope Highton, with whom he would spend the final three decades of his life—Hello finds relief from personal crisis in a world slipping by at ferocious speed. Creeley is prescient in these poems in his attention to what we would now call “globalization,” refusing to turn away from what is near at hand—hotels in particular—to seek out some imagined or expected “spirit of place.” Vivid, accurate, concise: Creeley’s ability here and elsewhere to evoke a scene in only a few words is formidable, especially when the scene in question is familiar.3 Charles Olson once defined history as “the practice of space in time,” and Creeley’s descriptions are often historical in just this sense, a situated knowledge that instinctively links memory to inhabitation—a correlation made explicit in his final sequence, “Caves” (313–18), written after a visit to the Dordogne. But Creeley’s poetry is not always or even primarily autobiographical. Though a record of his life, its primary material is not fact but language. Poetry’s claim on our attention derives precisely from this emphasis, which, for a poet, can be a source of freedom from fact, or, as in Creeley’s case, the basis for a new understanding of fact’s import. As Creeley often noted, composition has its own logic, following a course that shapes as much as it is shaped by what a writer makes of experience: “If at times I have said that I enjoy what I write, I mean that writing is for me the most viable and open condition of possibility in the world. Things have happened there, as they have happened nowhere else—and I am not speak-

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ing of ‘make-believe,’ which, be it said, is ‘as real as real can be.’ In poems I have both discovered and borne testament to my life in ways no other possibility has given me.”4 The results of this discovery and testament now fill two large volumes of his Collected Poems, seventeen individual collections falling into four general phases of activity: an initial proposition of terms, procedures, and possibilities (The Charm [1967], For Love [1962], and Words [1967]); a decade of sustained experiment (Pieces [1969] through Hello [1978]); fifteen years of determined composition, of reasserting and, in some cases, of rethinking what came before (Later [1979] through Echoes [1994]); and a glorious summation (beginning with Life & Death [1999]), in which the writing becomes wise without abandoning humor, and magisterial without losing its improvisational movement or sense of play. Across this stretch of time Creeley also wrote numerous essays, a book of short stories, a novel, several experiments in prose, and thousands of letters. But it is his poetry above all that one returns to, that one cherishes, that one wishes to keep close at hand. Particularity, commonality, language, and person: these are the principal terms of Robert Creeley’s art, a sixty-year inquiry into the nature of experience. Like Dante before him, to whom the first poem in this book pays homage, he believed in an eloquence particular to time and place, a poetry shaped from the common language, in accordance with the needs of the work at hand. “I believe in a poem determined by the language of which it is made,” he once wrote, and also, “I want to know something— I want to know how and why and what it is, to be human.”5 What binds these two assertions together is Creeley’s recognition that the sources of poetry are always shared, yet remain singular. A life lived in history, a function of relationships beyond any one person’s control, is nevertheless one’s own life. Words likewise live in history—this was Dante’s insight— and that is why they do not simply tell a story, but become a part of it. It is an old idea, that poets uphold the dignity of language. Creeley’s contribution to this ethic of craft is his notion that the dignity of language is not, finally, distinguishable from our own. “The English teacher all that time ago who said, ‘You must learn to speak correctly,’ was only wrong in forgetting to say why—for these words which depend upon us for their

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very existence fail as our usage derides or excludes them. They are no more right or wrong than we are, yet suffer our presumption forever.”6 By what presumption, then, did Robert Creeley become a poet? By what expectation of fulfillment or success did he take hold of the sources—language and person—from which his work would ever after draw its strength? For even a casual reading of his early poems—collected in For Love and The Charm7 —reveals a confidence in speech that is thrilling, even when the usage seems to deride or exclude our understanding. In “And” (71), for example, an improbable conjunction sends the poet hurtling across space, across time, into a grave that may well be (how know for certain?) a grave meaning. For if the form of a poem extends its content, as Creeley’s memorable dictum declares, then how explain the breakneck speed of this extension? Yet the speed brings pleasure, whatever its meaning; one wants to read the poem again and again, even in the absence of understanding. That a poem may elude understanding while communicating pleasure is a secret of modernism—and Creeley was a modernist in his earliest inspiration. Opacity was never his aim, but a willingness to risk opacity for what one might say, or for the pleasure of saying what one can say, this presumption, implicit in his work from the very beginning, became explicit in his writing of the 1960s. Not that opacity was the only possible result. More important to Creeley’s ongoing development than his clusters of opaque language were works on the order of “A Piece” (110) and “The Farm” (111), which are simple to the point of apparent negligibility. Of these poems in particular he once wrote, “They began to gain for me the possibility of scribbling, of writing for the immediacy of the pleasure and without having to pay attention to some final code of significance.”8 In Pieces and A Day Book, this “scribbling” begins to take precedence; yet out of Creeley’s obedience to pleasure—to the fact that writing begins, as writing, in the physical act of making words—came, paradoxically, his most extended meditations on significance, “The Finger” (114–19) and “Numbers” (119– 31). In the former we read, “Whatever is said/in the world, or forgotten,/ or not said, makes a form. // The choice is simply,/I will ”; in the latter, “There is no trick to reality— /a mind/makes it, any/mind.” Presumption, then, gives way to permission, making possible the fluid

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line and narrative freedom of Creeley’s long poems of the 1970s and after. The best of these, beginning with “For My Mother: Genevieve Jules Creeley” (162–65), are frankly autobiographical. Some, like “Oh Max” (211–15), luxuriate in memory; others (“Out Here” [181–82]) attend to the vividness of a present moment; still others bear witness to the sheer fact of living, to time made manifest as aging, alteration, absence (“Later” [188–96]). The apotheosis of this aspect of Creeley’s writing is “Histoire de Florida” (256–72), an affirmation of what is and of the mortal mind’s ability to meet it. A poem, also, about art, one that adds to Wallace Stevens’s three demands (It Must Be Abstract; It Must Change; It Must Give Pleasure) Creeley’s humble, historicizing fourth: “It must be anecdotal.” As a young man, Creeley developed a knack for short, syntactically dense poems loosened only by their verbal dexterity and wry, occasionally black humor. These are the poems that made his reputation, raw delineations of conflicted relationships, in which the entire lyric tradition seems to contract into the bare fact of situation, speaker, perception. Naysayers found fault with this poetry’s persistent elision, enjambment, and compression, but those very qualities—with their intimations of struggle, immediacy, intensity—were integral to his work’s overall success. Like pop songs that become unforgettable not despite but because of their flirtation with noise, the poems in For Love and later Words are dramas of articulation performed on the brink of shamed silence, euphoric nonsense, blind rage. Insistently vernacular, conscious of literary tradition, Creeley in his earliest poems is at once culturally specific and generalizing, presenting his amorous and domestic situations as the particular manifestations of a common experience. This is clearest in those poems (like “Stomping with Catullus” [47–48]) that modernize old forms or formulations to the point of parody. Yet the joke, if there is one, is on the present, for when Creeley writes (in “Heroes” [71–72]), “That was the Cumaean Sibyl speaking./This is Robert Creeley, and Virgil/is dead now two thousand years,” we see that the differentiation of present from past, of the poem at hand from poetry as such, is precisely the problem with which these works are concerned. “What am I to myself/that must be remembered,/insisted upon/so often?” he asks in “The Rain” (75–76). As the form of the question suggests, the

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quest for singularity inevitably leads inward, even as the quest for a shared reality returns the poet to the world. In Words, the inward turn transforms Creeley’s poetics of experience in surprising ways. Already in “The Hill” (74) he had realized that patterns of behavior learned in the world, patterns of mind modeled on objects in the world, can outlive their use and become, even as dead forms, determinative. In “The Pattern” (93–94), we learn that these dead forms have their afterlife in language. But words for Creeley can do much more than turn “a tongue/rotten with what // it tastes” (“Words” [103]). In language, he shows, the I too abides—just as, in the world, language abides as a disposition of the I. Both object and agent of knowledge, the I guards a distinction between language and world, perception and reality, that Creeley, reaching a point of crisis, will find increasingly difficult to maintain. Caught up in this difficulty, his language of experience becomes an experience of language, one in which the very possibility of experience—of a self secure in its acts, perceptions, memories, and place in the world— seems to be at issue. The poems of these years (the first two-thirds of the 1960s) are stripped of specificity, even music, as if to lay bare the basic structures of thought, but the intimations of crisis they impart are palpable. In some, the crisis is given a personal cast, but in many the I is abstract, the phenomenological subject of a philosophical problem. Thus, in “Some Place” (101– 2), perception’s power seems to sap the world of solidity; in “The Window” (92–93), perception’s own solidity makes the world too heavy to bear. The formulations vary; what persists is the problem of coming to terms with what these investigations permit the poet to think, feel, and write. But Words radicalizes Creeley’s earlier work in another way as well. Where the poems in The Charm and For Love occasionally shock with their freely expressed hostility (“The Changes” [46]) and even brutality (“The Warning” [60]), those raw moments are nothing when compared to the concentrated fury of “Anger” (95–101) or the violence of “The Hole” (107–9). The former is especially disturbing, not least for the way the poet’s detached stance and disjunct narration mirror the consciousness of the man he describes. Scrupulous in its description, naked in what it reveals, the poem rivals Dickinson in its unflinching examination of the

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inner life—a comparison that may seem improper given the specific object of wrath. (“The Hole” is even more focused on violence against women.) But to whom, then, should one compare this writing? Creeley’s principal inspirations at that point in his career—Pound, Williams, Lawrence, Crane, Zukofsky, Olson, Ginsberg—hardly account for his willingness to expose such a masculine pathology to light. In “Chasing the Bird” (45), an early poem, Creeley had written, “My mind/to me a mangle is.” A quarter century later, in “Desultory Days” (197–201), he would make the same point while affirming his kinship to Dickinson: “the existential/terror of New England/countrywoman, Ms. // Dickinson . . ./moves me. My mind // to me a nightmare is.” This nightmare—which gripped Creeley early on, demanding a proper expression— will recede as he grows older; but it never disappears entirely. In “Pure” (242–43), he tries to take responsibility for its reoccurrence. In “Conversion to Her” (290–92), he tries to will away its ill effects. But when he sees this nightmare anew in his own face (“Self-Portrait” [203–4]), or finds it spread before him in the street (“The Drunks of Helsinki” [237–38]), he never hesitates or recoils from putting the fact in words. The philosophical querying of the 1960s is carried forward in Creeley’s subsequent writing—in “Thinking (‘I’ve thought of myself ’)” (236), “Old Story (‘Like kid on float’)” (275), and “To think . . .” (311), among other poems—but the primacy of the physical act of writing asserted in Pieces will fix even his more abstract poems in a particular here and now, alleviating the earlier sense of epistemological crisis. In “As real as thinking . . .” (111–13), for example, Creeley moves forward word by word, “into a present,/a presence”—an incremental progress that again makes the world seem a place of habitation. In “Massachusetts” (154–55), this word-by-word progression accomplishes something more: it makes the world into a place the poet might share with others. This desire for a common world helps to explain the increasing appeal of the word “echo,” which in the 1970s became frequent in his work—it signifies an answer produced by the very fact of speech. The content of this speech is often of secondary importance; when Creeley writes, at the end of “Thinking (‘Had not’)” (139–40), “He wants to sit down/on a chair/he holds in the

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air/by putting it there,” he indirectly evokes the French philosopher Blaise Pascal, who kept a chair by his bed as a solid reminder, in the midst of waking nightmares, that the floor had not yet opened up beneath his pillow. For Creeley, the concrete detail, iterated in language, becomes a kind of reassurance. More concrete still is Hello, the record of a State Department– sponsored trip across the Pacific. Subtitled “A Journal, February 29–May 3, 1976,” Hello adopts an innovative structure that locates each poem in a specific time and place. Already in Pieces, Creeley had experimented with unique forms of organization (Fig. 1). There, the emphasis fell on establishing a coherent set of relationships between part and whole— between “piece” and poem, poem and group of poems. In Hello, the emphasis is instead on grounding, on the relationship each “piece” maintains to an actual world. Thus, at the end of each day’s writing, Creeley gives a date of composition; a place-name precedes all the entries written at each particular locale (Fig. 2). Only occasionally do these framing specifics present essential information. More often, what matters most is the fact of location, as in “There” (180), which gestures toward a place that the poem declines to name, or “Hong Kong Window” (175–76), which despite its name records an experience of dislocation (the “egocentric/abstraction” of a high-rise hotel view).9 This oblique relationship to chronology and geography, to facts and even autobiography, is typical of Creeley’s work of the period. Pieces was diaristic in method—a sequence of jottings set in chronological order—and A Day Book was often diaristic in content, but even in Hello, which is manifestly a diary, Creeley is less interested in documenting his life than attending to it. There are certainly poems from these years that leave a detailed record of his experience, but the majority of them are concerned with the experience of experience: with what it means to think, love, look, talk, or listen. At the end of the 1970s, Creeley embarked on a long, robust period of composition, fifteen years of assimilating, reasserting, and reconsidering the gains of his previous decades: the self-assurance and vehemence of his early work, which came to a point of crisis in Words; and the selfquestioning and experiment of Pieces through Hello. A few of these per-

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mutations have already been mentioned: the narrative freedom of Creeley’s later writing, his attempt to move beyond crisis toward care, and his desire for grounding in an actual, shareable world. Two other points of continuity also bear notice: his continued interest in music, and the poem’s abiding status as thing. Creeley’s intense interest in music dates from his Harvard years, when he became friends with musicians and began visiting jazz clubs. Isolated later in New Hampshire, he learned what he could from recordings. “This is what I was doing from 1946 to 1950. I was frankly doing almost nothing else but sitting around listening to records, which my first wife would be pleased to testify to. I listened to records. I was fascinated by them.”10 From music he learned that getting something said, however freely, involves an articulation of time, and, like the jazz musicians who inspired him, he moved with ease between improvisation and constraint. In subsequent years he would often work with performers and composers. Highlights from these projects include Steve Swallow’s 1979 album Home (ECM), featuring vocals by Sheila Jordan, and Steve Lacy’s Futurities (Hat Art, 1985), which presented twenty settings with vocals by Irene Aebi. Creeley’s work with visual artists is even more extensive, encompassing all phases of his activity. John Altoon, Joe Brainard, John Chamberlain, Francesco Clemente, Jim Dine, Elsa Dorfman, Max Gimblett, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Robert Indiana, Alex Katz, R. B. Kitaj, Arthur Okamura, Archie Rand, Susan Rothenberg, James Surls—these are only some of the artists involved.11 His essays on art take up many of the same figures, but also Arakawa and Madeline Gins, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Franz Kline, Brice Marden, and Frank Stella, among others. In one of these essays, on the painter René Laubiès, Creeley says of art’s object status, “A picture is first a picture, the application of paint or ink or whatever to a given surface—which act shall effect a thing in itself significant, an autonomy.”12 A decade later a similar view of writing would give rise to his fascination with “scribbling” in Pieces. Music—heard and made—reverberates in Creeley’s work from the very beginning, in ways that are both explicit (“Jack’s Blues” [78–79]) and implicit, even obscure (“The Whip” [61], which Creeley describes as “trying to use a rhythmic base much as jazz of the time would”).13 The increasing

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FIGURE 1. Two-page spread from Robert Creeley’s Pieces (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969) showing the poem “3 in 1” (see 134). Note the triple dots separating “3 in 1” from “The Boy” and “They,” and the single dots that separate the poem’s three component “pieces” (there is also a single dot after “They,” marking that poem as one “piece” in a larger grouping). In Collected Poems the triple dots become wide spaces. (Courtesy of Penelope Creeley.)

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FIGURE 2. Two-page spread from Robert Creeley’s Hello: A Journal, February 29–May 3, 1976 (New York: New Directions, 1978) showing the last six quatrains of “So There,” written in Auckland, New Zealand (see Fig. 5 and 171–72). Note the date at the end of the poem (March 26); the new place-name (Sydney, Australia) on the next page; the new date (March 27) between “Now” and “Yah,” which were both written in Sydney; and the single dot before the stanza beginning “Funny what your head.” The multiple forms of demarcation make it possible to read “Funny what your head” as (1) a poem in its own right, (2) part of the poem “Yah,” (3) part of the sequence dated March 28, and (4) part of the sequence written in Sydney. (Courtesy of New Directions and Penelope Creeley.)

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importance of the written word does not conflict with this attention to sound. “It still makes sense/to know the song after all,” he wrote in the 1950s (“The Song” [77]), and in the sixties he made clear that this was so by announcing his new emphasis on “scribbling” with “A Piece,” a poem composed from the very words a bandleader might use to introduce a new number. What does change over time is the range of sounds and kinds of music Creeley’s writing can accommodate. One inspiration for this changing shape of song is Louis Zukofsky, whose “Songs of Degrees” (“Hear, her/Clear/Mirror,/Care/His error,” etc.) Creeley himself first published in the Black Mountain Review. Unlike Zukofsky, however, who famously viewed the poem as having an “upper limit” of music and “lower limit” of speech, Creeley used music to reinvigorate speech. In letting his sounds articulate new relations among words, he never put so much pressure on syntax that the poem ceased to be recognizable as an act of communication. “Ice Cream” (in Pieces, a book dedicated to Zukofsky) is a good example of this (135–36). The portion beginning “Letter to General/Eisenhower” might seem on first reading a mere babble of sounds; but however improvisational the composition may have been, Creeley’s concise arrangement of plosives (“Better // be/right. // Better batter/bigger pancakes”) makes perfect sense as a sendup of military communiqués. Attending to sound, then, becomes a way to construct new paths for meaning in language. (Here Creeley may have also absorbed the additional influence of John Cage, whose work he once described as a matter of “perceptions and their arousal.”)14 Later examples of this more inclusive use of sound include “The Place” (196–97), which sings the very process of thinking, and “Après Anders” (220–24), a series of improvisations on the work of German poet Richard Anders. But no poem of Creeley’s makes clearer this link between song and speech than “Gnomic Verses” (246–54), an extended sequence from Echoes that gives oracular utterance without solemnity by keeping faith with the childhood pleasures of singsong rhythm and rhyme. In parallel with this ongoing deployment of music, Creeley reasserted the importance of the poem’s thingness. He had long been fascinated with the clear articulation of basic forms (witness “A Picture” [110]), but his protracted study of elemental units in Pieces and A Day Book gave this ar-

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ticulation a new compactness, as in Thirty Things (1974), a series of short poems with the precisely defined shape and solidity one associates with sculpture. Words for Creeley can be “voluptuous / as the flesh,” and “Tangible” (“Love” [184]), even obdurate. The obstruction described in “Wall” (218–19) is an actual wall (“faded, chipped . . . //fixed with icicles/ like teeth”), but also language, which the mind can animate after the fashion of Shakespeare’s Bottom, who gives voice to the character Wall in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Closer still to sculpture is “Eight Plus” (231– 35), written for the artist James Surls, who engraved eight of the twentyfour poems (along with iconic images) on the polished surfaces of eight granite bollards in Los Angeles. “What’s still here settles/at the edges of this/simple place” describes the poem and also the page or stone that supports it, a solid shape of language given solid place in the world (Fig. 3). Creeley’s collaboration with Surls helps to identify another kind of thingness important to his work: the poem’s material existence as a text that can and does take shape in more than one medium. Written by hand (Fig. 4), preserved as a sound file (Fig. 5), or printed in a book (Figs. 1, 2, 6, 7), to give but three examples, the poem is a thing endlessly adaptable to new purposes, new forms of presentation, new contexts. In some cases, these changes of purpose, form, or context also change the meaning—or at least our understanding—of the text proper. Consider the poem “En Famille” (286–89), written in response to photographs of couples, families, and groups of close friends taken by his longtime friend Elsa Dorfman. The poem was first published alongside twenty-two of these photographs,15 arranged in such a way that one discovers the image that inspired a particular set of lines by turning the page. Thus, before coming upon a picture of Creeley with his wife and their children (Fig. 8) we read about “the twisting face I want to be my own,” and before coming upon a picture of two seated women (Fig. 9) we read, “Tell me your happiness is simply true. / Tell me I can still learn to be like you”—two different acts of identification that the images permit us to distinguish and that the plain text blends together. But it is not simply that the images amplify our understanding; they also change it. In the text that includes Dorfman’s photographs, Creeley’s poem becomes a search among particular groups of people for a way back into the “nurturing relation” cast off in desperation many years before; the

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speaker’s absence from these groups, all but one, is palpable. In the plain text, the particular families become a single crowd and the speaker’s observing distance shrinks, swallowed up in the generality of the poem’s pronouns. What he seeks is not a way back in—his sympathy and interest seem to have already won that—but an understanding of the “humanness” he and the others hold in common. In this reading of the poem, the speaker becomes—notwithstanding his echo of Wordsworth in the opening line (“I wandered lonely as a cloud . . . /I’d seemingly lost the crowd/I’d come with”)—as all-embracing as Whitman, an association that the French title also suggests by recalling such poems as “Our Old Feuillage,” where Whitman sees “diverse families . . . branching forth into numberless branches” and declares, “out of a thousand diverse contributions one identity.” Any writer who lives long enough to produce a substantial body of work will find, eventually, that iteration and reiteration are no longer so easily distinguished; that part of the pleasure of writing comes from the exercise of well-tested talents, or from the smallest of variations on a favorite theme. This pleasure must have been especially compelling for Creeley, for whom the very nature of poetry involved a zeroing in on those points where particularity gives access to the common and commonalities take particular shape. His reuse of titles (exemplified in this collection by three poems each named “Echo” and “Thinking”) gives one instance of this testing and retesting of premises, insights, and possibilities. Other poems test the very apparatus of communication, much as one tests a microphone by counting one, two, three. “The euphemistic/I speaks always, always // wanting a you to be here,” Creeley has it in one poem (“You will never be here” [141]). In poetry, here is always the poem at hand, its “always” a witness to the permanence of desire. Inevitably, some readers found fault with this perpetual testing, or at least found perplexing the total shape and overall value of what it produced. Deepening this perplexity was Creeley’s embrace of what he earlier resisted (such as undisguised autobiography), and his purposeful resistance to what he earlier embraced (such as undisguised anger and crisis). There was, to be sure, ample evidence all through this later work of Creeley’s continued inventiveness, intelligence, and clarity of feeling.

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Hannah Creeley touching one of the inlaid granite slabs forming the 1991 Robert Creeley–James Surls collaboration Once There Was a Forest (for the poem, see 231). The photograph is by Robert Creeley. (Courtesy of Penelope Creeley and James Surls.)

FIGURE 3.

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The final six quatrains of “So There” in Creeley’s notebook (see also Fig. 2 and 171–72). (Courtesy of Penelope Creeley and the Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries.)

FIGURE 4.

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FIGURE 5. CD covers from Robert Creeley’s reading of his poetry (produced by Optic Nerve for Birkbeck College, University of London). (Courtesy of Birkbeck College.)

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FIGURE 6. Two-page spread from St. Martin’s (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1971), which collected fifteen poems by Robert Creeley and eight monoprints by Bobbie Louise Hawkins (then Bobbie Creeley). The text reproduced above shows the conclusion to “The Act of Love” (see 143–45), a poem dedicated to Bobbie, alongside a monoprint by Bobbie Louise Hawkins. (Courtesy of Bobbie Louise Hawkins and Penelope Creeley.)

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FIGURE 7. Two-page spread from The Dogs of Auckland (Auckland, New Zealand: The Holloway Press, 1998), with drawing by Max Gimblett and section 3 of Creeley’s poem (see 279). (Courtesy of the Holloway Press, Max Gimblett, and Penelope Creeley.)

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FIGURE 8. Photograph of William, Penelope, Robert, and Hannah Creeley chosen for En Famille: A Poem by Robert Creeley; Photographs by Elsa Dorfman (New York: Granary Books, 1999). The image follows the section of the poem beginning “Turning inside as if in a dream” (see 288). (© 2007 Elsa Dorfman. All rights reserved; www.elsadorfman.com.)

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FIGURE 9. Elsa Dorfman photograph of Ruth and Marion Sittler chosen for En Famille. The image follows the section of the poem beginning “I like the way you both look out at me” (see 288 –89). (© 2007 Elsa Dorfman. All rights reserved; www.elsadorfman.com.)

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But the pleasure of this “evidence” was rooted in an experience of the work as a whole—a work more difficult to grasp or judge than the discrete projects or discrete poems of the years before. In the end, Creeley’s most memorable writing from the late seventies through the early nineties is as altered by excerpt as the texts he contributed to his collaborations. Later (1979), Mirrors (1983), Memory Gardens (1986), Windows (1990), and Echoes (1994) are, in this respect, an ongoing collaboration with time. Time alters the shape of Creeley’s poetry in another, more obvious way: by introducing new concerns (“Age” [227–29]), or by bringing new perspectives to bear on the old ones—a notable example of this being his changing regard for family, a site of conflict early on, but increasingly a haven (as two widely separated poems about fatherhood, “A Variation” [43] and “Time” [202–3], help to demonstrate). In family, moreover, Creeley finds a new emphasis and new address in his treatment of love, the subject that brought him his first fame as a writer. The brief, intense lyrics of Creeley’s youth—painful, fractious, tender, rhetorical—give way, by and large, to less conflicted expressions of feeling, these sometimes offered in longer poems that situate love within a broader range of experiential concerns. Addressing lovers, as before (as in “Oh Love” [205] and “Old Song” [312]), but also old friends (“Oh Max” [211–15]) and family at large (“I Love You” [187]), Creeley’s swelling “company of love” (85 [“For Love”]) makes palpable the difference between a young man’s singular attachments and the varied commitments of age. Life & Death (1999) inaugurates a final phase, a deepening assurance on Creeley’s part that what can be said must be said and will be understood that continues through If I were writing this (2003) and the posthumous On Earth (2006). Taken together, these three books offer a glorious conclusion to Creeley’s life in poetry, a succession of poems that are graceful, eloquent, and wise. The distinction of these late works is partly owing to their technical mastery, which is all the more impressive because it is so different in kind from the mastery of Creeley’s youth. His best-known poems of the 1950s had relied on enjambment for their effect, using line breaks in a manner learned from William Carlos Williams (where the impact is nonetheless very different) to make a music of hesitations, a pro-

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sodic deployment of syntax that became Creeley’s most identifiable trait. This halting idiom never disappears entirely (one can hear it, for example, in “Stairway to Heaven” [224] or the opening section of “Pictures” [300]), but by the start of the 1980s Creeley’s increasing reliance on improvisation had begun to give more prominence to fluidity, to a syntax of accretion. In his subsequent writing, momentum becomes at least as significant as hesitation (this is especially clear in “Helsinki Window” [238–41], which experiments with a new approach to enjambment), so that even those poems with extremely short lines (like “H’s” [225–26] or “Dutch Boy” [254–55]) are verbally propulsive, though visually disjunct.16 These gradual shifts in style are brought to a beautiful realization in Creeley’s final decade, in short poems of surpassing clarity and ease (“As If ” [300], “Bye and Bye” [312]), or long poems that luxuriate in fluency (“The Dogs of Auckland” [277–84]), spontaneity (“Clemente’s Images” [292–99]), and force (“Histoire de Florida” [256–72]). It is fitting that this artistic fullness should come in a confrontation with diminishing physical powers, for Creeley’s acceptance of what is—which entered his poetry as a method of writing in Pieces and became a method of apprehending the world in Hello—developed in his last years into an ethic of understanding, one that achieves its fullest significance in the face of failing health (a subject first taken up in the 1980s). “You’ve left a lot out/Being in doubt/you left/it out,” Creeley writes in “Histoire de Florida” (269), but overcoming doubt to leave in is precisely his strength in these late poems, a feat of imagination to which Creeley pays homage in his last essay, “Reflections on Whitman in Age.” There Creeley reveals that elevation is not a matter of what one says, but of one’s ability to think and say it: “Age wants no one to leave. Things close down in age, like stores, like lights going off, like a world disappearing in a vacancy one had no thought might happen. It’s no fun, no victory, no reward, no direction. One sits and waits, usually for the doctor. So one goes inside oneself, as it were, looks out from that ‘height’ with only imagination to give prospect.”17 Thus, at the “height” of his final years Creeley articulates a darkening vision in which the prospect of life is not some future reward, but an everdisappearing present sustained only by the acts of mind that apprehend it. As he writes retrospectively in “The Way,” an emphatically secular decla-

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ration of belief, “Only knowing was measure of what one could/make hold together for that moment’s recognition,/or else the world washed over like a flood/of meager useless truths, of hostile incoherence” (285). Many of the poems from Creeley’s last decade are self-consciously last writings: summations (“Credo” [272–74]), goodbyes (“Goodbye” [275– 76]), and scoutings of the final horizon (“Emptiness” [309–10]). Others express with brute humor (“Supper” [306]) or tender acceptance (“When I think . . .” [310–11]) an old man’s perspective on what life requires or required. One might call this requirement the human condition, were it not the common fate of all living creatures—a fact that Creeley acknowledges in “The Dogs of Auckland” (277–84), as charming and complete a celebration of life as he ever wrote. But no less important than this celebration of the given is Creeley’s adherence to the possible, to the if in “If I were writing this . . .” (307–8), the poem as inquiry, imagining, hypothesis, project. This, surely, was the meaning of Projective Verse, of a form extending content into areas of thought and feeling that poetry preserves and makes available to others. This, surely, was the essence of Creeley’s gift, a gift for poetry and to us, his readers: In testament to a willingness to live, I, Robert Creeley, being of sound body and mind, admit to other preoccupations— with the future, with the past. But now— but now the wonder of life is that it is at all, this sticky sentimental warm enclosure, feels place in the physical with others, lets mind wander

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to wondering thought, then lets go of itself, finds a home on earth. (“Later” [195–96])

The present selection of Creeley’s poetry is an abridgment of the two volumes of his Collected Poems, with all of the work set in the order established for those two volumes. The size of the book is about equal to that of Creeley’s own selection from 1991, but within that space I have accommodated work from four subsequent volumes: Echoes, Life & Death, If I were writing this, and On Earth. Moreover, at Creeley’s own request, I have rethought the selections from his earlier volumes so as to provide a rereading of the work from the vantage point of its completion. My aim throughout has been to trace the entire sixty-year arc of Creeley’s accomplishment by focusing on those poems that touch most forcefully on his deepest commitments. To this end, I have given more or less equal attention to the four phases identified near the start of this introduction. (Because the last phase produced less work than the others, I have given it slightly less space.) The emphasis throughout is on poems, and this has meant forgoing a representation of Creeley’s experiments in organization (of the sort one finds in Pieces and Hello); the decision to follow the text established for Collected Poems has also meant forgoing a representation of his many collaborations with visual artists. The richness and variety of Creeley’s work supports a number of different approaches to abridgment. I hope that my preface at least sheds light on those other approaches, and that readers for whom this book serves as an introduction will be inspired to seek out Creeley’s other volumes. The texts of Creeley’s poems have been unusually stable over time; what changes from edition to edition is by and large not the wording, punctuation, or lineation, but the context and appearance—what contemporary textual scholars sometimes call the bibliographic “code,” the typeface, page design, presence of illustrations, and relationships to surrounding text, aspects of a poem’s presentation that are often but not always beyond a poet’s control.18 Creeley was extremely sensitive to such

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matters of presentation, and he took pleasure in the variations of impact and meaning that a poem’s translation to a new context could offer. This I learned at first hand when I helped him proofread his 1993 edition of Charles Olson’s Selected Poems. Although Creeley was a great admirer of George F. Butterick’s editions of Olson’s work, he believed that every edition must be suited to its own conditions of reception. To this end, he approved a new page size and new typeface for Olson’s poetry, wanting a fresh presentation to represent the need for a fresh reading. Moreover, as if to emphasize the essential mutability of all texts, Olson’s in particular, he adopted one of the textual variants offered by Butterick at the end of The Maximus Poems, changing “Erojan” to “Eroian” in his book’s penultimate poem.19 Creeley brought the same attention to detail and the same perspective on the editor’s task to his own Selected Poems in 1991. That edition incorporated scarcely any revisions in the ordinary sense—the bibliographic code was of course entirely new—but the few changes Creeley did make were at once carefully considered and specifically oriented toward the distinctive needs of his abridgment. Two of these changes are pertinent to my own selection and I have carried them over here. Following Creeley’s lead, I have used first lines within quotation marks as titles for untitled excerpts from Pieces, A Day Book, and Hello, and like Creeley I have dropped the identifying tags giving places and dates of composition for “Later” and “Oh Max” (these are now cited in the notes). In addition to these two modifications of the text as given in Collected Poems, I have also followed Creeley’s example in giving book titles in the table of contents but not in the text proper, allowing the reader an easy identification of the provenance of particular poems while emphasizing the new connections between poems produced by abridgment. I depart from Creeley’s practice, however, in using the title A Day Book. That 1972 volume, no longer in print, was a mixed-genre work divided in two sections: “A Day Book,” written in prose; and “In London,” a sequence of poems. The prose portion now appears in Creeley’s Collected Prose; the poetry portion, titled In London, appears in volume one of his Collected Poems. The notes at the back are sparing by design. They include translations

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of foreign words and occasional comments by Creeley from his essays, interviews, and letters, and from recordings of his readings. When I first began work on this book, I fully expected to place the end result in Creeley’s hands. I looked forward to that moment, and to all the moments of conversation there would be in between. Since his death in March 2005, I have had occasion to mourn his absence for many reasons—of which the most trivial, surely, is absence of guidance. But that absence has left me all the more humbled by his trust. I hope the present selection rewards that trust. In preparing the final manuscript, I relied heavily on the advice, knowledge, and resources of a number of friends and colleagues, in particular Carla Billitteri, Penelope Creeley, Kevin Davies, Monica Fauble, and Kaplan Page Harris. Peter Culley and Peter Gizzi contributed their expertise regarding choice of poems; Joshua Clover, Alan Gilbert, Burt Hatlen, Bob Perelman, and Barrett Watten offered sound advice on the introduction; Michael Davidson, Ken Norris, Marjorie Perloff, and Arlo Quint gave crucial readings of the manuscript as a whole. My thanks are also due to Laura Cerruti for her help in all stages of production, and to Rachel Berchten, Charles Bernstein, Anselm Berrigan, Tom Clark, Chris Funkhouser, Robert Grenier, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Jack Kimball, Joel Kuszai, Joanne Kyger, Jonathan Mayhew, Tom Raworth, Robin Schulze, and Rod Smith for their answers to specific queries or their help in thinking through general issues pertinent to the editing. BENJAMIN FRIEDLANDER BANGOR, MAINE OCTOBER 2006

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NOTES 1.

Robert Creeley, “Autobiography” (1989), in Tom Clark, Robert Creeley and the Genius of the American Common Place (New York: New Directions, 1993), 126. A new edition of Creeley’s Collected Essays is currently in preparation, so all quotations from his critical prose are identified by essay title as well as page reference to the currently available text.

2.

The journal’s contributors would include, in addition to those published by Divers Press, Edward Dorn, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Denise Levertov, Kenneth Rexroth, William Carlos Williams, and Louis Zukofsky.

3.

See, for example, “The Birds” (146–47), written during Creeley’s Bolinas years, and the differently domestic “Buffalo Evening” (209).

4.

Robert Creeley, “I’m Given to Write Poems” (1967), in The Collected Essays of Robert Creeley (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 504.

5.

Robert Creeley, “A Note” (1960) and “Ecce Homo” (1977), in Collected Essays, 477 and 405.

6.

Robert Creeley, Selected Poems (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), xxi.

7.

For Love collected the majority of Creeley’s poems of the 1950s, drawing on four previous volumes; The Charm gathers all the remaining work from 1945 through to the early sixties.

8.

Robert Creeley, “Contexts of Poetry” (1968), in Collected Essays, 535.

9.

“Cebu” (172–75) takes up the same problem as “Hong Kong Window,” but from the vantage point of the ground—and here the specifics of location do matter.

10.

Robert Creeley, Contexts of Poetry: Interviews 1961–1971 (Bolinas: Four Seasons Foundation, 1973), 49.

11.

For a beautifully illustrated account of this activity, see In Company: Robert Creeley’s Collaborations, ed. Amy Cappellazzo and Elizabeth Licata (Niagara Falls: Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University, 1999).

12.

Robert Creeley, “René Laubiès: An Introduction” (1954), in Collected Essays, 379.

13.

Robert Creeley, “Form” (1987), in Collected Essays, 591.

14.

Robert Creeley, “Mehr Licht . . .” (1968), in Collected Essays, 401.

15.

A reproduction of this original version is available for view at the website of the publisher, Granary Books: www.granarybooks.com/books/dorfman/ dorfman2.htm (last accessed March 30, 2007).

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16.

The importance of momentum is even more pronounced when we shift our attention away from the prosody of individual poems to the experience of reading Creeley’s later books entire.

17.

Robert Creeley, “Reflections on Whitman in Age” (2005), in On Earth: Last Poems and an Essay (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), 83.

18.

The distinction between a poem’s language and the presentation of that language in a book—between linguistic and bibliographic codes—is developed into a theory of textual editing by Jerome J. McGann in The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). For a fine demonstration of the relevance of this theory for readers of twentieth-century texts, see George Bornstein, Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

19.

The change I cite draws on George F. Butterick’s “Alternate and Questionable Readings in Volume Three,” in The Maximus Poems, by Charles Olson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), n.p. See also Creeley’s note on his editing of the text in Charles Olson, Selected Poems (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), xx.

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Selected Poems, 1945–2005

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Guido, i’ vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io Guido, I would that you, me & Lapo (so a song sung: sempre d’amore . . .) were out of this had got to the reaches of some other wood. Deadness is echo deadness is memory & their deadness is petulant, the song gone dead in their heads. Echo is memory and all that they foster is dead in its sound has no ripeness could come to its own. Petulance is force so contested. They have twisted the meanings & manner the force of us out of us left us the faded (Who made musick the sound of the reaches the actual wood

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The Surf: An Elegy Relative to cost, the high figures of production: you, sweetness & light are destructive only in your inveterate tendencies. The poor are poor. The statement the little people would not I think accept, is that there is any refuge that there is anything to be gained in too simple formulation. Or what else to destroy them with? To keep them you, lover grant is impossible: the blot is nationwide, the indulgence federal. Dams, projects of even immense size take on but a few. (But you are restless, the tide pulls out, leaving scum, the likewise restless and improbable stores of the sea.

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A Variation 1 My son who is stranger than he should be, outgrown at five, the normal— luck is against him! Unfit for the upbringing he would otherwise have got, I have no hopes for him. I leave him alone. I leave him to his own devices, having pity not so much that he is strange but that I am him. 2 Myself, who am stranger than I should be, outgrown at two, the normal— luck is against me. Unfit for the upbringing I would otherwise have got, I have no hopes. I leave him alone. I leave him to his own devices, having pity not so much for myself, for why should that happen but that he is me, as much as I am him.

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The Charm My children are, to me, what is uncommon: they are dumb and speak with signs. Their hands are nervous, and fit more for hysteria, than goodwill or long winterside conversation. Where fire is, they are quieter and sit, comforted. They were born by their mother in hopelessness. But in them I had been, at first, tongue. If they speak, I have myself, and love them.

The Method of Actuality the mother (mother) unbent to give to anyone. The young The sudden & inconsequent. The gentle stare. I see myself in long & uncombed hair bedridden, sullen, and face to face, a face of hair. My mother’s son.

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The Revelation I thought that if I were broken enough I would see the light like at the end of a small tube, but approachable. I thought chickens laid eggs for a purpose. For the reason expected, a form occurred more blatant and impossible to stop me.

Chasing the Bird The sun sets unevenly and the people go to bed. The night has a thousand eyes. The clouds are low, overhead. Every night it is a little bit more difficult, a little harder. My mind to me a mangle is.

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The Changes People don’t act like they act in real life in real life. They are slower and record the passive changes of atmosphere. Or change themselves into green persian dogs and birds. When you see one you know the world is a contrivance. It has proverbiality. People are poor.

For Somebody’s Marriage All night in a thoughtful mood, she resigned herself to a conclusion—heretofore rejected. She woke lonely,

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she had slept well, yet because of it her mind was clearer, less defended— though confident.

Stomping with Catullus 1 My love—my love says she loves me. And that she would never have anyone but me. Though what a woman tells to a man who pushes her should be written in wind and quickly moving water. 2 My old lady says I’m it, she says nobody else cd ever make it. But what my old lady says when pushed to it,— well, that don’t make it.

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3 My old lady is a goof at heart, she tells me she loves me, we’ll never part— but what a goofed up chick will tell to a man is best written in wind & water & sand. 4 Love & money & a barrel of mud, my old man gives out for stud, comes home late from his life of sin, now what do you think I should tell to him? 5 We get crazy but we have fun, life is short & life gets done, time is now & that’s the gig, make it, don’t just flip yr wig.

“To Work Is to Contradict Contradictions, to Do Violence to Natural Violence . . .” To consummate the inconsummate, and make of it the unending. Work, work, work. Six days of the week you shall work, on the seventh you shall think about it.

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‘Mary, pass the potatoes’ becomes division of subject & object. Work, work, work. Get them yourself. Thought is a process of work, joy is an issue of work.

Not Again Sometimes I am embarrassed by the recurrence of that pronoun which calls into question, rather into prominence, my own face. Of course I am embarrassed, what else? Like with the waiter with the tray on which repose (only) his own hands. Always— Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday— no matter where I look, I am there. It was a breeze and a seashell brought in Venus— but I can be here without going anywhere. So goodbye until we meet again, and when you come, walk right in. It’s I.

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In a Boat Shed I waited too long, I waited for you forever and ever: the changing unchanging restlessness of the signs they didn’t put up or down; the boxes of oranges, rat poisons, barns, a sled with no runners, snow, refreshments, pineapples; the odor of burnt wood, cigarettes neither one of us should smoke, but do— I waited for you.

The Sentence There is that in love which, by the syntax of, men find women and join their bodies to their minds —which wants so to acquire a continuity, a place, a demonstration that it must be one’s own sentence.

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The Ear He cannot move the furniture through that small aperture, yet expects it must serve used with reserve. To wit, the company that comes runs to be first in, arranges what it can within the man, who (poor fool) bulges with secrets he never divulges.

Hart Crane FOR SLATER BROWN

1 He had been stuttering, by the edge of the street, one foot still on the sidewalk, and the other in the gutter . . . like a bird, say, wired to flight, the wings, pinned to their motion, stuffed. The words, several, and for each, several senses. “It is very difficult to sum up briefly . . .” It always was.

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(Slater, let me come home. The letters have proved insufficient. The mind cannot hang to them as it could to the words. There are ways beyond what I have here to work with, what my head cannot push to any kind of conclusion. But my own ineptness cannot bring them to hand, the particulars of those times we had talked.) “Men kill themselves because they are afraid of death, he says . . .” The push beyond and into 2 Respect, they said he respected the ones with the learning, lacking it himself (Waldo Frank & his 6 languages) What had seemed important While Crane sailed to Mexico I was writing (so that one betrayed himself )

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He slowed (without those friends to keep going, to keep up), stopped dead and the head could not go further without those friends . . . And so it was I entered the broken world Hart Crane. Hart

The Crisis Let me say (in anger) that since the day we were married we have never had a towel where anyone could find it, the fact. Notwithstanding that I am not simple to live with, not my own judgement, but no matter. There are other things: to kiss you is not to love you. Or not so simply. Laughter releases rancor, the quality of mercy is not strained.

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The Innocence Looking to the sea, it is a line of unbroken mountains. It is the sky. It is the ground. There we live, on it. It is a mist now tangent to another quiet. Here the leaves come, there is the rock in evidence or evidence. What I come to do is partial, partially kept.

The Ball Game The one damn time (7th inning) standing up to get a hot dog someone spills mustard all over me. The conception is the hit, whacko! Likewise out of the park of our own indifferent vulgarity, not mind you, that one repents even the most visual satisfaction.

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Early in life the line is straight made straight against the grain. Take the case of myself, and why not since these particulars need no further impetus, take me at the age of 13 and for some reason there, no matter the particular reason. The one damn time (7th inning) standing up to get a hot dog someone spills mustard all over me.

After Lorca FOR M. MARTI

The church is a business, and the rich are the business men. When they pull on the bells, the poor come piling in and when a poor man dies, he has a wooden cross, and they rush through the ceremony. But when a rich man dies, they drag out the Sacrament and a golden Cross, and go doucement, doucement to the cemetery. And the poor love it and think it’s crazy.

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The Dishonest Mailmen They are taking all my letters, and they put them into a fire. I see the flames, etc. But do not care, etc. They burn everything I have, or what little I have. I don’t care, etc. The poem supreme, addressed to emptiness—this is the courage necessary. This is something quite different.

The Immoral Proposition If you never do anything for anyone else you are spared the tragedy of human relationships. If quietly and like another time there is the passage of an unexpected thing: to look at it is more than it was. God knows nothing is competent nothing is all there is. The unsure egoist is not good for himself.

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The Conspiracy You send me your poems, I’ll send you mine. Things tend to awaken even through random communication. Let us suddenly proclaim spring. And jeer at the others, all the others. I will send a picture too if you will send me one of you.

I Know a Man As I sd to my friend, because I am always talking,—John, I sd, which was not his name, the darkness surrounds us, what can we do against it, or else, shall we & why not, buy a goddamn big car, drive, he sd, for christ’s sake, look out where yr going.

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The Death of Venus I dreamt her sensual proportions had suffered sea-change, that she was a porpoise, a sea-beast rising lucid from the mist. The sound of waves killed speech but there were gestures— of my own, it was to call her closer, of hers, she snorted and filled her lungs with water, then sank, to the bottom, and looking down, clear it was, like crystal, there I saw her.

The Lover What should the young man say, because he is buying Modess? Should he blush or not. Or turn coyly, his head, to one side, as if in the exactitude of his emotion he were not offended? Were proud? Of what? To buy a thing like that.

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The Business To be in love is like going outside to see what kind of day it is. Do not mistake me. If you love her how prove she loves also, except that it occurs, a remote chance on which you stake yourself ? But barter for the Indian was a means of sustenance. There are records.

The Disappointment Had you the eyes of a goat, they would be almond, half-green, halfyellow, an almond shape to them. Were you less as you are, cat-like, a brush head, sad, sad, ungoatlike.

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The Warning For love—I would split open your head and put a candle in behind the eyes. Love is dead in us if we forget the virtues of an amulet and quick surprise.

Naughty Boy When he brings home a whale she laughs and says, that’s not for real. And if he won the Irish sweepstakes, she would say, where were you last night? Where are you now, for that matter? Am I always (she says) to be looking at you? She says, if I thought it would get any better I would shoot you, you nut, you. Then pats her hair into place, and waits for Uncle Jim’s deep-fired, all-fat, real gone whale steaks.

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The Whip I spent a night turning in bed, my love was a feather, a flat sleeping thing. She was very white and quiet, and above us on the roof, there was another woman I also loved, had addressed myself to in a fit she returned. That encompasses it. But now I was lonely, I yelled, but what is that? Ugh, she said, beside me, she put her hand on my back, for which act I think to say this wrongly.

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A Form of Women I have come far enough from where I was not before to have seen the things looking in at me through the open door and have walked tonight by myself to see the moonlight and see it as trees and shapes more fearful because I feared what I did not know but have wanted to know. My face is my own, I thought. But you have seen it turn into a thousand years. I watched you cry. I could not touch you. I wanted very much to touch you but could not. If it is dark when this is given to you, have care for its content when the moon shines. My face is my own. My hands are my own. My mouth is my own but I am not.

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Moon, moon, when you leave me alone all the darkness is an utter blackness, a pit of fear, a stench, hands unreasonable never to touch. But I love you. Do you love me. What to say when you see me.

The Friend What I saw in his head was an inverted vision, and the glass cracked when I put my hand in. My own head is round with hair for adornment, but the face is an ornament. Your face is wide with long hair, and eyes so wide they grow deep as I watch.

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If the world could only be rounder, like your head, like mine, with your eyes for real lakes! I sleep in myself. That man was a friend, sans canoe, and I wanted to help him.

Please FOR JAMES BROUGHTON

Oh god, let’s go. This is a poem for Kenneth Patchen. Everywhere they are shooting people. People people people people. This is a poem for Allen Ginsberg. I want to be elsewhere, elsewhere. This is a poem about a horse that got tired. Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. I want to go home. I want you to go home. This is a poem which tells the story, which is the story. I don’t know. I get lost. If only they would stand still and let me. Are you happy, sad, not happy, please come. This is a poem for everyone.

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Oh No If you wander far enough you will come to it and when you get there they will give you a place to sit for yourself only, in a nice chair, and all your friends will be there with smiles on their faces and they will likewise all have places.

A Wicker Basket Comes the time when it’s later and onto your table the headwaiter puts the bill, and very soon after rings out the sound of lively laughter— Picking up change, hands like a walrus, and a face like a barndoor’s, and a head without any apparent size, nothing but two eyes— So that’s you, man, or me. I make it as I can, I pick up, I go faster than they know— Out the door, the street like a night, any night, and no one in sight, but then, well, there she is, old friend Liz—

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And she opens the door of her cadillac, I step in back, and we’re gone. She turns me on— There are very huge stars, man, in the sky, and from somewhere very far off someone hands me a slice of apple pie, with a gob of white, white ice cream on top of it, and I eat it— Slowly. And while certainly they are laughing at me, and all around me is racket of these cats not making it, I make it in my wicker basket.

A Marriage The first retainer he gave to her was a golden wedding ring. The second—late at night he woke up, leaned over on an elbow, and kissed her. The third and the last— he died with and gave up loving and lived with her.

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Ballad of the Despairing Husband My wife and I lived all alone, contention was our only bone. I fought with her, she fought with me, and things went on right merrily. But now I live here by myself with hardly a damn thing on the shelf, and pass my days with little cheer since I have parted from my dear. Oh come home soon, I write to her. Go fuck yourself, is her answer. Now what is that, for Christian word? I hope she feeds on dried goose turd. But still I love her, yes I do. I love her and the children too. I only think it fit that she should quickly come right back to me. Ah no, she says, and she is tough, and smacks me down with her rebuff. Ah no, she says, I will not come after the bloody things you’ve done. Oh wife, oh wife—I tell you true, I never loved no one but you. I never will, it cannot be another woman is for me. That may be right, she will say then, but as for me, there’s other men. And I will tell you I propose to catch them firmly by the nose.

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And I will wear what dresses I choose! And I will dance, and what’s to lose! I’m free of you, you little prick, and I’m the one can make it stick. Was this the darling I did love? Was this that mercy from above did open violets in the spring— and made my own worn self to sing? She was. I know. And she is still, and if I love her? then so I will. And I will tell her, and tell her right . . . Oh lovely lady, morning or evening or afternoon. Oh lovely lady, eating with or without a spoon. Oh most lovely lady, whether dressed or undressed or partly. Oh most lovely lady, getting up or going to bed or sitting only. Oh loveliest of ladies, than whom none is more fair, more gracious, more beautiful. Oh loveliest of ladies, whether you are just or unjust, merciful, indifferent, or cruel. Oh most loveliest of ladies, doing whatever, seeing whatever, being whatever. Oh most loveliest of ladies, in rain, in shine, in any weather. Oh lady, grant me time, please, to finish my rhyme.

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Damon & Pythias When he got into bed, he was dead. Oh god, god, god, he said. She watched him take off his shoes and kneel there to look for the change which had fallen out of his pocket. Old Mr. Jones whom nobody loves went to market for it, and almost found it under a table, but by that time was unable. And the other day two men, who had been known as friends, were said to be living together again.

If You If you were going to get a pet what kind of animal would you get. A soft bodied dog, a hen— feathers and fur to begin it again. When the sun goes down and it gets dark I saw an animal in a park.

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Bring it home, to give it to you. I have seen animals break in two. You were hoping for something soft and loyal and clean and wondrously careful— a form of otherwise vicious habit can have long ears and be called a rabbit. Dead. Died. Will die. Want. Morning, midnight. I asked you if you were going to get a pet what kind of animal would you get.

The Invoice I once wrote a letter as follows: dear Jim, I would like to borrow 200 dollars from you to see me through. I also wrote another: dearest M/ please come. There is no one here at all. I got word today, viz: hey sport, how are you making it? And, why don’t you get with it.

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And A pretty party for people to become engaged in, she was twentythree, he was a hundred and twentyseven times all the times, over and over and under and under she went down stairs, through doorways, glass, alabaster, an iron shovel stood waiting and she lifted it to dig back and back to mother, father and brother, grandfather and grandmother— They are all dead now.

Heroes In all those stories the hero is beyond himself into the next thing, be it those labors of Hercules, or Aeneas going into death. I thought the instant of the one humanness in Virgil’s plan of it was that it was of course human enough to die, yet to come back, as he said, hoc opus, hic labor est.

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That was the Cumaean Sibyl speaking. This is Robert Creeley, and Virgil is dead now two thousand years, yet Hercules and the Aeneid, yet all that industrious wisdom lives in the way the mountains and the desert are waiting for the heroes, and death also can still propose the old labors.

Going to Bed That dim shattering character of nerves which creates faces in the dark speaks of the heaven and hell as a form of corporate existence. Oh don’t say it isn’t so, think to understand if the last time you looked you were still a man. It is a viscous form of selfpropulsion that lets the feet grip the floor, as the head lifts to the door, lurches, ghostwise, out, and to the window to fall through, yet closes it to let the cat out too.

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After that, silence, silence. On the floor the hands find quiet, the mouth goes lax. Oh! Look forward to get back. Oh wisdom to find fault with what is after all a plan.

The Flower I think I grow tensions like flowers in a wood where nobody goes. Each wound is perfect, encloses itself in a tiny imperceptible blossom, making pain. Pain is a flower like that one, like this one, like that one, like this one.

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The Hill It is some time since I have been to what it was had once turned me backwards, and made my head into a cruel instrument. It is simple to confess. Then done, to walk away, walk away, to come again. But that form, I must answer, is dead in me, completely, and I will not allow it to reappear— Saith perversity, the willful, the magnanimous cruelty, which is in me like a hill.

Kore As I was walking I came upon chance walking the same road upon. As I sat down by chance to move later if and as I might,

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light the wood was, light and green, and what I saw before I had not seen. It was a lady accompanied by goat men leading her. Her hair held earth. Her eyes were dark. A double flute made her move. “O love, where are you leading me now?”

The Rain All night the sound had come back again, and again falls this quiet, persistent rain. What am I to myself that must be remembered, insisted upon so often? Is it

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that never the ease, even the hardness, of rain falling will have for me something other than this, something not so insistent— am I to be locked in this final uneasiness. Love, if you love me, lie next to me. Be for me, like rain, the getting out of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semilust of intentional indifference. Be wet with a decent happiness.

Midnight When the rain stops and the cat drops out of the tree to walk away, when the rain stops, when the others come home, when the phone stops, the drip of water, the potential of a caller any Sunday afternoon.

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The Song It still makes sense to know the song after all. My wiseness I wear in despair of something better. I am all beggar, I am all ears. Soon everything will be sold and I can go back home by myself again and try to be a man.

The Cracks Don’t step so lightly. Break your back, missed the step. Don’t go away mad, lady in the nightmare. You are central, even necessary. I will attempt to describe you. I will be completely without face, a lost chance, nothing at all left.

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“Well,” he said as he was leaving, “blood tells.” But you remembered quickly other times, other faces, and I slipped between the good intentions, breathlessly. What a good boy am I who wants to. Will you, mother, come quickly, won’t you. Why not go quietly, be left with a memory or an insinuation or two of cracks in a pavement.

Jack’s Blues I’m going to roll up a monkey and smoke it, put an elephant in the pot. I’m going out and never come back. What’s better than that. Lying on your back, flat on your back with your eyes to the view.

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Oh the view is blue, I saw that too, yesterday and you, red eyes and blue, funked. I’m going to roll up a rug and smoke it, put the car in the garage and I’m gone, like a sad old candle.

The Sign Board The quieter the people are the slower the time passes until there is a solitary man sitting in the figure of silence. Then scream at him, come here you idiot it’s going to go off. A face that is no face but the features, of a face, pasted on a face until that face is faceless, answers by a being nothing there where there was a man.

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The End of the Day Oh who is so cosy with despair and all, they will not come, rejuvenated, to the last spectacle of the day. Look! the sun is sinking, now it’s gone. Night, good and sweet night, good night, good, good night, has come.

For Fear For fear I want to make myself again under the thumb of old love, old time subservience and pain, bent into a nail that will not come out.

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Why, love, does it make such a difference not to be heard in spite of self or what we may feel, one for the other, but as a hammer to drive again bent nail into old hurt?

Mind’s Heart Mind’s heart, it must be that some truth lies locked in you. Or else, lies, all lies, and no man true enough to know the difference.

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Love Comes Quietly Love comes quietly, finally, drops about me, on me, in the old ways. What did I know thinking myself able to go alone all the way.

After Mallarmé Stone, like stillness, around you my mind sits, it is a proper form for it, like stone, like compression itself, fixed fast, grey, without a sound.

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For Love FOR BOBBIE

Yesterday I wanted to speak of it, that sense above the others to me important because all that I know derives from what it teaches me. Today, what is it that is finally so helpless, different, despairs of its own statement, wants to turn away, endlessly to turn away. If the moon did not . . . no, if you did not I wouldn’t either, but what would I not do, what prevention, what thing so quickly stopped. That is love yesterday or tomorrow, not now. Can I eat what you give me. I have not earned it. Must I think of everything as earned. Now love also becomes a reward so remote from me I have only made it with my mind.

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Here is tedium, despair, a painful sense of isolation and whimsical if pompous self-regard. But that image is only of the mind’s vague structure, vague to me because it is my own. Love, what do I think to say. I cannot say it. What have you become to ask, what have I made you into, companion, good company, crossed legs with skirt, or soft body under the bones of the bed. Nothing says anything but that which it wishes would come true, fears what else might happen in some other place, some other time not this one. A voice in my place, an echo of that only in yours. Let me stumble into not the confession but the obsession I begin with now. For you

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also (also) some time beyond place, or place beyond time, no mind left to say anything at all, that face gone, now. Into the company of love it all returns.

The Rhythm It is all a rhythm, from the shutting door, to the window opening, the seasons, the sun’s light, the moon, the oceans, the growing of things, the mind in men personal, recurring in them again, thinking the end is not the end, the time returning, themselves dead but someone else coming. If in death I am dead, then in life also dying, dying . . . And the women cry and die. 85

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The little children grow only to old men. The grass dries, the force goes. But is met by another returning, oh not mine, not mine, and in turn dies. The rhythm which projects from itself continuity bending all to its force from window to door, from ceiling to floor, light at the opening, dark at the closing.

The Mountains in the Desert The mountains blue now at the back of my head, such geography of self and soul brought to such limit of sight, I cannot relieve it nor leave it, my mind locked in seeing it as the light fades. Tonight let me go at last out of whatever mind I thought to have, and all the habits of it.

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For W. C. W. The rhyme is after all the repeated insistence. There, you say, and there, and there, and and becomes just so. And what one wants is what one wants, yet complexly as you say. Let’s let it go. I want— Then there is— and, I want.

For No Clear Reason I dreamt last night the fright was over, that the dust came, and then water, and women and men, together again, and all was quiet in the dim moon’s light.

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A paean of such patience— laughing, laughing at me, and the days extend over the earth’s great cover, grass, trees, and flowering season, for no clear reason.

The Messengers FOR ALLEN GINSBERG

The huge dog, Broderick, and the smile of the quick eyes of Allen light a kind world. Their feelings, under some distance of remote skin, must touch, wondering at what impatience does block them. So little love to share among so many, so much yellow-orange hair, on the one, and on the other, such a darkness of long hanging hair now, such slightness of body, and a voice that rises on the sounds of feeling. Aie! It raises the world, lifts, falls, like a sudden sunlight, like that edge of the black night sweeps the low lying fields, of soft grasses, bodies, fills them with quiet longing.

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I “is the grandson of Thomas L. Creeley, who acquired eight acres of Belmont land around 1880 and continued “His house was numbered 375 Common st. and his farm lands, through the heart of which the present Creeley rd. runs, adjoined the Chenery holdings and extended toward Waverly from upper Common st. The author’s father, the late Dr. Oscar Creeley, was a prominent Watertown physician for many years and headed the staff of Symmes Hospital in Arlington.” I, is late But I saw a picture of him once, T. L. in a chair in Belmont, or it was his invalid and patient wife they told me sat there, he was standing, long and steady faced, a burden to him she was, and the son. The other child had died

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They waited, so my father who also died when I is four gave all to something like the word “adjoined,” “extended” so I feels I sees the time as long and wavering grass in all about the lot in all that cemetery again the old man owned a part of so they couldn’t dig him up.

Something I approach with such a careful tremor, always I feel the finally foolish question of how it is, then, supposed to be felt, and by whom. I remember once in a rented room on 27th street, the woman I loved then, literally, after we had made love on the large bed sitting across from a basin with two faucets, she had to pee but was nervous, embarrassed I suppose I would watch her who had but

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a moment ago been completely open to me, naked, on the same bed. Squatting, her head reflected in the mirror, the hair dark there, the full of her face, the shoulders, sat spread-legged, turned on one faucet and shyly pissed. What love might learn from such a sight.

The Language Locate I love you somewhere in teeth and eyes, bite it but take care not to hurt, you want so much so little. Words say everything. I love you again,

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then what is emptiness for. To fill, fill. I heard words and words full of holes aching. Speech is a mouth.

The Window Position is where you put it, where it is, did you, for example, that large tank there, silvered, with the white church alongside, lift all that, to what purpose? How heavy the slow world is with everything put in place. Some man walks by, a car beside him on the dropped

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road, a leaf of yellow color is going to fall. It all drops into place. My face is heavy with the sight. I can feel my eye breaking.

The Pattern As soon as I speak, I speaks. It wants to be free but impassive lies in the direction of its words. Let x equal x, x also equals x. I speak to hear myself speak? I

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had not thought that something had such undone. It was an idea of mine.

Some Afternoon Why not ride with pleasure and take oneself as measure, making the world tacit description of what’s taken from it for no good reason, the fact only. There is a world elsewhere, but here the tangible faces smile, breaking into tangible pieces. I see myself and family, and friends, and animals attached, the house, the road,

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all go forward in a huge flash, shaken with that act. Goodbye, goodbye. Nothing left after the initial blast but some echo like this. Only the faded pieces of paper etc.

Anger 1 The time is. The air seems a cover, the room is quiet. She moves, she had moved. He heard her. The children sleep, the dog fed, the house around them is open, descriptive, a truck through the walls, lights bright there,

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glaring, the sudden roar of its motor, all familiar impact as it passed so close. He hated it. But what does she answer. She moves away from it. In all they save, in the way of his saving the clutter, the accumulation of the expected disorder— as if each dirtiness, each blot, blurred happily, gave purpose, happily— she is not enough there. He is angry. His face grows—as if a moon rose of black light, convulsively darkening, as if life were black. It is black. It is an open hole of horror, of nothing as if not enough there is nothing. A pit—

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which he recognizes, familiar, sees the use in, a hole for anger and fills it with himself, yet watches on the edge of it, as if she were not to be pulled in, a hand could stop him. Then as the shouting grows and grows louder and louder with spaces of the same open silence, the darkness, in and out, himself between them, stands empty and holding out his hands to both, now screaming it cannot be the same, she waits in the one while the other moans in the hole in the floor, in the wall.

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2 Is there some odor which is anger, a face which is rage. I think I think but find myself in it. The pattern is only resemblance. I cannot see myself but as what I see, an object but a man, with lust for forgiveness, raging, from that vantage, secure in the purpose, double, split. Is it merely intention, a sign quickly adapted, shifted to make a horrible place for self-satisfaction. I rage. I rage, I rage.

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3 You did it, and didn’t want to, and it was simple. You were not involved, even if your head was cut off, or each finger twisted from its shape until it broke, and you screamed too with the other, in pleasure. 4 Face me, in the dark, my face. See me. It is the cry I hear all my life, my own voice, my eye locked in self sight, not the world what ever it is but the close breathing beside me I reach out for, feel as

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warmth in my hands then returned. The rage is what I want, what I cannot give to myself, of myself, in the world. 5 After, what is it—as if the sun had been wrong to return, again. It was another life, a day, some time gone, it was done. But also the pleasure, the opening relief even in what was so hated.

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6 All you say you want to do to yourself you do to someone else as yourself and we sit between you waiting for whatever will be at last the real end of you.

Some Place I resolved it, I found in my life a center and secured it. It is the house, trees beyond, a term of view encasing it. The weather reaches only as some wind, a little deadened sighing. And if the life weren’t? when was something to happen, had I secured that—had I, had I, insistent. There is nothing I am, nothing not. A place between, I am. I am

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more than thought, less than thought. A house with winds, but a distance —something loose in the wind, feeling weather as that life, walks toward the lights he left.

Fancy Do you know what the truth is, what’s rightly or wrongly said, what is wiseness, or rightness, what wrong, or welldone if it is, or is not, done. I thought. I thought and thought and thought. In a place I was sitting, and there it was, a little faint thing hardly felt, a kind of small nothing.

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Words You are always with me, there is never a separate place. But if in the twisted place I cannot speak, not indulgence or fear only, but a tongue rotten with what it tastes— There is a memory of water, of food, when hungry. Some day will not be this one, then to say words like a clear, fine ash sifts, like dust, from nowhere.

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A Reason Each gesture is a common one, a black dog, crying, a man, crying. All alike, people or things grow fixed with what happens to them. I throw a stone. It hits the wall, it hits a dog, it hits a child— my sentimental names for years and years ago, from something I’ve not become. If I look in the mirror, the wall, I see myself. If I try to do better and better, I do the same thing. Let me hit you. Will it hurt. Your face is hurt all the same.

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A Sight Quicker than that, can’t get off “the dead center of ” myself. He/I were walking. Then the place is/was not ever enough. But the house, if admitted, were a curiously wrought complexity of flesh. The eyes windows, the head roof form with stubbornly placed bricks of chimney. I can remember, I can. Then when she first touched me, when we were lying in that bed, was the feeling of falling into no matter we both lay quiet, where was it. I felt her flesh

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enclose mine. Cock, they say, prick, dick, I put it in her, I lay there. Come back, breasts, come. Back. The sudden thing of being no one. I never felt guilty, I was confused but could not feel wrong, about it. I wanted to kill her. I tried it, tentatively, just a little hurt. Hurt me. So immense she was. All the day lying flat, lying it seemed upon a salty sea, the houses bobbing around her, under her, I hung on for dear life to her.

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But when now I walk, when the day comes to trees and a road, where is she. Oh, on my hands and knees, crawling forward.

The Hole There is a silence to fill. A foot, a fit, fall, filled. If you are not careful all the water spills. One day at the lake I took off my bathing suit in the water, peed with pleasure, all out, all

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the water. Wipe yourself, into the tight ass paper is pushed. Fatty Arbuckle, the one hero of the school, took a coke bottle, pushed it up his girl. But I wouldn’t dare, later, felt there, opened myself. Broken glass, broken silence, filled with screaming, on the bed she didn’t want it, but said, after, the only time it felt right. Was I to force her. Mother, sister, once seen, had breasts. My father I can’t remember

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but a man in some building, we were all swimming, took out his to piss, it was large. He was the teacher. Everywhere there is pleasure, deep, with hands and feet. I want to, now I can’t wait any longer. Talk to me, fill emptiness with you, empty hole.

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A Picture A little house with small windows, a gentle fall of the ground to a small stream. The trees are both close and green, a tall sense of enclosure. There is a sky of blue and a faint sun through clouds.

A Piece One and one, two, three.

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They (2) They were trying to catch up. But from the distance between them, one thought it would be a long time even with persistent running. They were walking slower and slower for hours and hours.

The Farm Tips of celery, clouds of grass—one day I’ll go away.

“As real as thinking . . .” As real as thinking wonders created by the possibility— forms. A period at the end of a sentence which

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began it was into a present, a presence saying something as it goes.

. No forms less than activity. All words— days—or eyes— or happening is an event only for the observer? No one there. Everyone here.

. Small facts of eyes, hair blonde, face looking like a flat painted board. How opaque as if a reflection merely, skin

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vague glove of randomly seen colors.

. Inside and out impossible locations— reaching in from outside, out from inside—as middle: one hand.

The Family Father and mother and sister and sister and sister.

. Here we are. There are five ways to say this.

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The Finger Either in or out of the mind, a conception overrides it. So that that time I was a stranger, bearded, with clothes that were old and torn. I was told, it was known to me, my fate would be timeless. Again and again I was to get it right, the story I myself knew only the way of, but the purpose if it had one, was not mine. The quiet shatter of the light, the image folded into endlessly opening patterns— had they faced me into the light so that my eye was blinded? At moments I knew they had gone but searched for her face, the pureness of its beauty, the endlessly sensual— but no sense as that now reports it. Rather, she was beauty, that Aphrodite I had known of, and caught sight of as maid— a girlish openness—or known as a woman turned from the light.

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I knew, however, the other, perhaps even more. She was there in the room’s corner, as she would be, bent by a wind it seemed would never stop blowing, braced like a seabird, with those endlessly clear grey eyes. Name her, Athena—what name. The osprey, the sea, the waves. To go on telling the story, to go on though no one hears it, to the end of my days? Mercury, Hermes, in dark glasses. Talk to him—but as if one talked to the telephone, telling it to please listen— is that right, have I said it— and the reflecting face echoes some cast of words in mind’s eye, attention a whip of surmise. And the power to tell is glory. One unto one unto one. And though all mistake it, it is one. I saw the stones thrown at her. I felt a radiance transform my hands and my face. I blessed her, I was one.

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Are there other times? Is she that woman, or this one. Am I the man— and what transforms. Sit by the fire. I’ll dance a jig I learned long before we were born for you and you only then. I was not to go as if to somewhere, was not in the mind as thinking knows it, but danced in a jigging intensive circle before the fire and its heat and that woman lounging. How had she turned herself ? She was largely warm— flesh heavy—and smiled in some deepening knowledge. There are charms. The pedlar and the small dog following and the whistled, insistent song. I had the pack, the tattered clothing, was neither a man nor not one, all that—

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and who was she, with the fire behind her, in the mess of that place, the dust, the scattered pieces, her skin so warm, so massive, so stolid in her smiling the charm did not move her but rather kept her half-sleepy attention, yawning, indulging the manny who jiggled a world before her made of his mind. She was young, she was old, she was small. She was tall with extraordinary grace. Her face was all distance, her eyes the depth of all one had thought of, again and again and again. To approach, to hold her, was not possible. She laughed and turned and the heavy folds of cloth parted. The nakedness burned. Her heavy breath, her ugliness, her lust— but her laughing, her low

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chuckling laugh, the way she moved her hand to the naked breast, then to her belly, her hand with its fingers. Then shone— and whatever is said in the world, or forgotten, or not said, makes a form. The choice is simply, I will—as mind is a finger, pointing, as wonder a place to be. Listen to me, let me touch you there. You are young again, and you are looking at me. Was there ever such foolishness more than what thinks it knows and cannot see, was there ever more? Was the truth behind us, or before? Was it one or two, and who was I?

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She was laughing, she was laughing, at me, and I danced, and I danced. Lovely, lovely woman, let me sing, one to one to one, and let me follow.

Numbers FOR ROBERT INDIANA

ONE

What singular upright flourishing condition . . . it enters here, it returns here.

. Who was I that thought it was another one by itself divided or multiplied produces one.

. This time, this place, this one.

.

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You are not me, nor I you.

. All ways.

. As of a stick, stone, something so fixed it has a head, walks, talks, leads a life. TWO

When they were first made, all the earth must have been their reflected bodies, for a moment— a flood of seeming bent for a moment back to the water’s glimmering— how lovely they came.

. What you wanted I felt, or felt I felt. This was more than one.

.

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This point of so-called consciousness is forever a word making up this world of more or less than it is.

. Don’t leave me. Love me. One by one.

. As if to sit by me were another who did sit. So to make you mine, in the mind, to know you. THREE

They come now with one in the middle— either side thus another. Do they know who each other is or simply walk with this pivot between them. Here forms have possibility.

. When either this or that becomes choice, this fact

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of things enters. What had been agreed now alters to two and one, all ways.

. The first triangle, of form, of people, sounded a lonely occasion I think—the circle begins here, intangible— yet a birth. FOUR

This number for me is comfort, a secure fact of things. The table stands on all fours. The dog walks comfortably, and two by two is not an army but friends who love one another. Four is a square, or peaceful circle,

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celebrating return, reunion, love’s triumph.

. The card which is the four of hearts must mean enduring experience of life. What other meaning could it have.

. Is a door four—but who enters.

. Abstract—yes, as two and two things, four things— one and three. FIVE

Two by two with now another in the middle or else at the side.

. From each of the four corners draw

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a line to the alternate points. Where these intersect will be five.

. When younger this was a number used to count with, and to imagine a useful group. Somehow the extra one—what is more than four— reassured me there would be enough. Twos and threes or one and four is plenty.

. A way to draw stars. SIX

Twisting as forms of it two and three— on the sixth day had finished all creation— hence holy— or that the sun is “furthest from

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equator & appears to pause, before returning . . .” or that it “contains the first even number (2), and the first odd number (3), the former representing the male member, and the latter the muliebris pudenda . . .” Or two triangles interlocked. SEVEN

We are seven, echoes in my head like a nightmare of responsibility—seven days in the week, seven years for the itch of unequivocal involvement.

. Look at the light of this hour.

.

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I was born at seven in the morning and my father had a monument of stone, a pillar, put at the entrance of the hospital, of which he was head.

. At sixes and sevens—the pen lost, the paper: a night’s dead drunkenness. Why the death of something now so near if this number is holy. Are all numbers one? Is counting forever beginning again.

. Let this be the end of the seven. EIGHT

Say “eight”— be patient. Two fours show the way.

. Only this number marks the cycle—

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the eight year interval— for that confluence makes the full moon shine on the longest or shortest day of the year.

. Now summer fades. August its month— this interval.

. She is eight years old, holds a kitten, and looks out at me.

. Where are you. One table. One chair.

. In light lines count the interval. Eight makes the time wait quietly.

. No going back— though half is four and half again is two.

.

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Octagonal. NINE

There is no point of rest here. It wavers, it reflects multiply the three times three. Like a mirror it returns here by being there.

. Perhaps in the emphasis implicit— over and over— “triad of triads,” “triply sacred and perfect number”—that resolves what— in the shifting, fading containment?

. Somehow the game where a nutshell covers the one object, a

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stone or coin, and the hand is quicker than the eye— how is that nine, and not three chances, except that three imaginations of it might be, and there are two who play— making six, but the world is real also, in itself.

. More. The nine months of waiting that discover life or death— another life or death— not yours, not mine, as we watch.

. The serial diminishment or progression of the products which helped me remember: nine times two is one-eight nine times nine is eight-one— at each end,

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move forward, backward, then, and the same numbers will occur.

. What law or mystery is involved protects itself. ZERO

Where are you—who by not being here are here, but here by not being here? There is no trick to reality— a mind makes it, any mind. You walk the years in a nothing, a no place I know as well as the last breath I took, blowing the smoke out of a mouth will also go nowhere, having found its way.

.

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Reading that primitive systems seem to have natural cause for the return to one, after ten— but this is not ten—out of nothing, one, to return to that— Americans have a funny way— somebody wrote a poem about it— of “doing nothing”—What else should, can, they do?

. What by being not is—is not by being.

. When holes taste good we’ll put them in our bread

. The Fool “With light step, as if earth and its trammels had little power to restrain him, a young man in gorgeous vestments pauses at the brink of a precipice among the great heights of the world; he surveys the blue distance before him—its expanse of sky rather than the prospect below. His act of eager walking is still indicated, though he is stationary at the given moment; his dog is still bounding. The edge which opens on the depth has no terror; it is as if angels were waiting to uphold him, if it came about that he leaped from the height. His countenance is full of intelligence and expectant dream. He has a rose in one hand and in the other a costly wand, from which depends over his right shoulder a wallet curiously embroidered. He is a prince of the other world on his travels through this one—all amidst the morning glory, in the keen air. The sun, which shines behind him, knows whence he came, whither he is going, and how he will return by another path after many days . . .”

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Diction The grand time when the words were fit for human allegation, and imagination of small, local containments, and the lids fit. What was the wind blew through it, a veritable bonfire like they say— and did say in hostile, little voices: “It’s changed, it’s not the same!”

America America, you ode for reality! Give back the people you took. Let the sun shine again on the four corners of the world you thought of first but do not own, or keep like a convenience. People are your own word, you invented that locus and term. Here, you said and say, is where we are. Give back what we are, these people you made, us, and nowhere but you to be.

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Place Thinking of you asleep on a bed on a pillow, on a bed—the ground or space you lie on. That’s enough to talk to now I got space and time like a broken watch.

. Hello there—instant reality on the other end of this so-called line.

. Oh no you don’t, do you?

. Late, the words, late the form of them, already past what they were fit for, one and two and three.

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3 in l FOR CHARLOTTE

The bird flies out the window. She flies.

. The bird flies out the window. She flies.

. The bird flies. She flies.

Again One more day gone, done, found in the form of days. It began, it ended—was forward, backward, slow, fast, a sun shone, clouds, high in the air I was

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for awhile with others, then came down on the ground again. No moon. A room in a hotel—to begin again.

Ice Cream Sure, Herbert— Take a bite— The crowd milling on the bridge, the night forms in the air. So much has gone away.

. Upside down forms faces.

. Letter to General Eisenhower from General Mount-

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batten. Better be right. Better batter bigger pancakes. You Chief Eat It.

. Something that hasn’t as yet had chance to wants the possibility of asking if what might be might be, if what has to be is otherwise.

. Oh so cute in your gorgeous gown you were. You were, you were, you-are-or-you-were-you-were.

Four Before I die. Before I die. Before I die. Before I die.

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“We’ll die . . .” We’ll die soon enough, and be dead— whence the whole system will fade from my head— “but why the torture . . .” as if another circumstance were forever at hand.

. Thinking of dying à la Huxley on acid so that the beatific smile his wife reported was effect possibly of the splendor of all possible experience?

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Or else, possibly, the brain cells, the whole organism, exploding, imploding, upon itself, a galaxy of light, energy, forever more.

. Die. Dead, come alive.

The Teachings of my grandmother who at over eighty went west from West Acton, to see a long lost son named Archie—by Greyhound, my other uncle, Hap, got the Globe to photograph her, and us— came back from Riverside, California, where Archie was—he’d left at eighteen—and he’d tried, she told us, to teach her religion, “at her age”—“as much a fool as ever”—and she never spoke of him again.

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“The men in my life were . . .” The men in my life were three in number, a father, uncle, grandfather—and with that father an interchangeable other—the Man—whom to score with, scream at. The wind rises in a fucking, endless volume.

Thinking Had not thought of it . . .

. Had nor thought nor vacancy — a space between. Linkage: the system, the one after another— Though the words agree? Though the sounds sound. The sea,

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the woods, those echoing hills . . .

. Even in a wood they stood— even without sound they are around. Here and there, and everywhere.

. All you people know everything! All you know you know. Hence nothing else to? —Laugh at that dichotomy. E.g., the one again from another one. Hold it— to unfold it open.

. He wants to sit down on a chair he holds in the air by putting it there. He wants to sleep in a bed he keeps in his head.

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“You will never be here . . .” You will never be here again, you will never see again what you now see— you, the euphemistic I speaks always, always wanting a you to be here.

. How the I speaks to you— over hills.

“Do You Think . . .” Do you think that if you once do what you want to do you will want not to do it. Do you think that if there’s an apple on the table and somebody eats it, it won’t be there anymore. Do you think that if two people are in love with one another, one or the other has got to be less in love than the other at some point in the otherwise happy relationship.

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Do you think that if you once take a breath, you’re by that committed to taking the next one and so on until the very process of breathing’s an endlessly expanding need almost of its own necessity forever. Do you think that if no one knows then whatever it is, no one will know and that will be the case, like they say, for an indefinite period of time if such time can have a qualification of such time. Do you know anyone, really. Have you been, really, much alone. Are you lonely, now, for example. Does anything really matter to you, really, or has anything mattered. Does each thing tend to be there, and then not to be there, just as if that were it. Do you think that if I said, I love you, or anyone said it, or you did. Do you think that if you had all such decisions to make and could make them. Do you think that if you did. That you really would have to think it all into reality, that world, each time, new.

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The Act of Love FOR BOBBIE

Whatever constitutes the act of love, save physical encounter, you are dear to me, not value as with banks— but a meaning selfsufficient, dry at times as sand, or else the trees, dripping with rain. How shall one, this socalled person, say it? He loves, his mind is occupied, his hands move writing words which come into his head. Now here, the day surrounds this man and woman sitting a small

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distance apart. Love will not solve it—but draws closer, always, makes the moisture of their mouths and bodies actively engage. If I wanted a dirty picture, would it always be of a woman straddled? Yes and no, these are true opposites, a you and me of nonsense, for our love. Now, one says, the wind lifts, the sky is very blue, the water just beyond me makes

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its lovely sounds. How dear you are to me, how lovely all your body is, how all these senses do commingle, so that in your very arms I still can think of you.

The Tiger Today we saw a tiger with two heads come bounding out of the forest by the corner of Main and Bailey. We were not afraid. The war had stopped fifteen minutes previous, we had stopped in a bar to celebrate, but now stood, transfixed, by another fear.

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The Birds FOR JANE AND STAN BRAKHAGE

I’ll miss the small birds that come for the sugar you put out and the bread crumbs. They’ve made the edge of the sea domestic and, as I am, I welcome that. Nights my head seemed twisted with dreams and the sea wash, I let it all come quiet, waking, counting familiar thoughts and objects. Here to rest, like they say, I best liked walking along the beach past the town till one reached the other one, around the corner of rock and small trees. It was clear, and often empty, and peaceful. Those lovely ungainly pelicans fished there, dropping like rocks, with grace, from the air, headfirst, then sat on the water, letting the pouch of their beaks grow thin again, then swallowing whatever they’d caught. The birds, no matter they’re not of our kind, seem most like us here. I want

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to go where they go, in a way, if a small and common one. I want to ride that air which makes the sea seem down there, not the element in which one thrashes to come up. I love water, I love water— but I also love air, and fire.

Sounds Some awful grating sound as if some monstrous nose were being blown.

. Yuketeh, yuketeh— moves slow through the water.

. Velvet purr, resting—

. Slosh, slush, longer wash of it. Converses.

. Tseet, tseet— then chatter, all the way home.

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People FOR ARTHUR OKAMURA

I knew where they were, in the woods. My sister made them little houses. Possibly she was one, or had been one before. They were there, very small but quick, if I moved. I never saw them. How big is small. What are we in. Do these forms of us take shape, then. Stan told us of the shape a march makes, in anger, a sort of small head, the vanguard, then a thin neck, and then, following out, a kind of billowing, loosely gathered body, always the same. It must be people seen from above have forms, take place, make an insistent pattern, not suburbs, but the way they gather in public places, or, hidden from others, look one by one, must be

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there to see, a record if nothing more. “In a tree one may observe the hierarchies of monkeys,” someone says. “On the higher branches, etc.” But not like that, no, the kids run, watch the wave of them pass. See the form of their movement pass, like the wind’s. I love you, I thought, suddenly. My hands are talking again. Inside each finger must be several men. They want to talk to me. On the floor the dog’s eye reflects the world, the people passing there, before him. The car holds possibly six people, comfortably, though each is many more. I’ll never die or else will be the myriad people all were always and must be— in a flower, in a hand, in some passing wind.

.

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These things seen from inside, human, a head, hands and feet. I can’t begin again to make more than was made. You’ll see them as flowers, called the flower people— others as rocks, or silt, some crystalline or even a stream of smoke. Why here at all —the first question— no one easily answers, but they’ve taken place over all else. They live now in everything, as everything. I keep hearing their voices, most happily laughing, but the screaming is there also. Watch how they go together. They are not isolated but meld into continuous place, one to one, never alone.

.

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From whatever place they may have come from, from under rocks, that moistness, or the sea, or else in those slanting places of darkness, in the woods, they are here and ourselves with them. All the forms we know, the designs, the closed-eye visions of order—these too they are, in the skin we share with them. If you twist one even insignificant part of your body to another, imagined situation of where it might be, you’ll feel the pain of all such distortion and the voices will flood your head with terror. No thing you can do can

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be otherwise than these people, large or small, however you choose to think them—a drop of water, glistening on a grassblade, or the whole continent, the whole world of size.

. Some stories begin, when I was young— this also. It tells a truth of things, of people. There used to be so many, so big one’s eyes went up them, like a ladder, crouched in a wall. Now grown large, I sometimes stumble, walk with no knowledge of what’s under foot.

. Some small echo at the earth’s edge

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recalls these voices, these small persistent movements, these people, the circles, the holes they made, the one multiphasic direction, the going, the coming, the lives. I fails in the forms of them, I want to go home.

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Massachusetts What gentle echoes, half heard sounds there are around here.

. You place yourself in such relation, you hear everything that’s said. Take it or leave it. Return it to a particular condition. Think slowly. See the things around you, taking place.

. I began wanting a sense of melody, e.g., following the tune, became somehow an image, then several, and I was watching those things becoming in front of me.

. The you imagined locates the response. Like turning a tv dial. The message, as one says, is information, a form of energy. The wisdom of the ages is “electrical” impulse.

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Lap of water to the hand, lifting up, slaps the side of the dock— Darkening air, heavy feeling in the air.

. A PLAN

On some summer day when we are far away and there is impulse and time, we will talk about all this.

Rain Things one sees through a blurred sheet of glass, that figures, predestined, conditions of thought.

. Things seen through plastic, rain sheets, trees blowing in a blurred steady sheet of vision.

.

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Raining, trees blow, limbs flutter, leaves wet with the insistent rain, all over, everywhere.

. Harry will write Mabel on Monday. The communication of human desires flows in an apparently clear pattern, aftersight, now they know for sure what it was. If it rains, the woods will not be so dry and danger averted, sleep invited.

Mouths Nuzz Mouths nuzzling, “seeking in blind love,” mouths nuzzling, “seeking in blind love . . .”

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Billfold Piece of me, curiously attached, you were in a bar for two days undrinking and unthinking, object of your own worth.

The Temper The temper is fragile as apparently it wants to be, wind on the ocean, trees moving in wind and rain.

Characteristically Characteristically and other words, places of fabulous intent, mirrors of wisdom, quiet mirrors of wisdom. Help the one you think needs it. Say a prayer to yourself.

. Echoes preponderantly backwards. Is alone.

. I’ll dash off to it.

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Hey Hey kid you.

. Flesh filled to bursting.

As We Sit There is a long stretch of sky before us. The road goes out to the channel of the water. Birds fly in the faintly white sky. A sound shuffles over and over, shifting sand and water. A wind blows steadily as we sit.

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Kitchen The light in the morning comes in the front windows, leaving a lace-like pattern on the table and floor.

. In the silence now of this high square room the clock’s tick adjacent seems to mark old time.

. Perpetually sweeping this room, I want it to be like it was.

Here Here is where there is.

Echo Broken heart, you timeless wonder. What a small place to be. True, true to life, to life.

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Xmas Poem: Bolinas All around the snow don’t fall. Come Christmas we’ll get high and go find it.

Place Faded mind, fading colors, old, dear clothes. Hear the ocean under the road’s edge, down the side of the hill.

One Day One day after another— perfect. They all fit.

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Thinking The top of the mountain is a pinnacle, the bottom of the lake a bed. Sleep fades deep, floats off as clouds shift sight to distance, far away.

Backwards Nowhere before you any of this.

Here No one else in the room except you.

. Mind’s a form of taking it all.

. And the room opens and closes.

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For My Mother: Genevieve Jules Creeley April 8, 1887–October 7, 1972 Tender, semiarticulate flickers of your presence, all those years past now, eightyfive, impossible to count them one by one, like addition, subtraction, missing not one. The last curled up, in on yourself, position you take in the bed, hair wisped up on your head, a top knot, body skeletal, eyes closed against, it must be, further disturbance— breathing a skim of time, lightly kicks the intervals—

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days, days and years of it, work, changes, sweet flesh caught at the edges, dignity’s faded dilemma. It is your life, oh no one’s forgotten anything ever. They want to make you happy when they remember. Walk a little, get up, now, die safely, easily, into singleness, too tired with it to keep on and on. Waves break at the darkness under the road, sounds in the faint night’s softness. Look at them, catching the light, white edge as they turn—

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always again and again. Dead one, two, three hours— all these minutes pass. Is it, was it, ever you alone again, how long you kept at it, your pride, your lovely, confusing discretion. Mother, I love you—for whatever that means, meant—more than I know, body gave me my own, generous, inexorable place of you. I feel the mouth’s sluggishness, slips on turns of things said, to you, too soon, too late, wants to go back to beginning,

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smells of the hospital room, the doctor she responds to now, the order—get me there. “Death’s let you out—” comes true, this, that, endlessly circular life, and we came back to see you one last time, this time? Your head shuddered, it seemed, your eyes wanted, I thought, to see who it was. I am here, and will follow.

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The Plan Is the Body The plan is the body. There is each moment a pattern. There is each time something for everyone. The plan is the body. The mind is in the head. It’s a moment in time, an instant, second. The rhythm of one and one, and one, and one. The two, the three. The plan is in the body. Hold it an instant, in the mind—hold it. What was said you said. The two, the three, times in the body, hands, feet, you remember— I, I remember, I speak it, speak it. The plan is the body. Times you didn’t want to, times you can’t think you want to, you. Me, me, remember, me here, me wants to, me am thinking of you. The plan is the body.

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The plan is the body. The sky is the sky. The mother, the father— the plan is the body. Who can read it. Plan is the body. The mind is the plan. I— speaking. The memory gathers like memory, plan, I thought to remember, thinking again, thinking. The mind is the plan of the mind. The plan is the body. The plan is the body. The plan is the body. The plan is the body.

Falling Falling from grace— umpteenth time rain’s hit my head, generous water.

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Phone What the words, abstracted, tell: specific agony, pain of one so close, so distant— abstract here— Call back, call to her—smiling voice. Say, it’s all right.

Sit Down Behind things or in front of them, always a goddamn adamant number stands up and shouts, I’m here, I’m here! —Sit down.

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So There FOR PENELOPE

Da. Da. Da da. Where is the song. What’s wrong with life ever. More? Or less— days, nights, these days. What’s gone is gone forever every time, old friend’s voice here. I want to stay, somehow, if I could— if I would? Where else to go. The sea here’s out the window, old switcher’s house, vertical, railroad blues, lonesome whistle, etc. Can you think of Yee’s Cafe in Needles, California opposite the train station—can you keep it ever together, old buddy, talking to yourself again?

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Meantime some yuk in Hamilton has blown the whistle on a charming evening I wanted to remember otherwise— the river there, that afternoon, sitting, friends, wine & chicken, watching the world go by. Happiness, happiness— so simple. What’s that anger is that competition—sad!— when this at least is free, to put it mildly. My aunt Bernice in Nokomis, Florida’s last act, a poem for Geo. Washington’s birthday. Do you want to say “it’s bad”? In America, old sport, we shoot first, talk later, or just take you out to dinner. No worries, or not at the moment, sitting here eating bread,

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cheese, butter, white wine— like Bolinas, “Whale Town,” my home, like they say, in America. It’s one world, it can’t be another. So the beauty, beside me, rises, looks now out window— and breath keeps on breathing, heart’s pulled in a sudden deep, sad longing, to want to stay—be another person some day, when I grow up. The world’s somehow forever that way and its lovely, roily, shifting shores, sounding now, in my ears. My ears? Well, what’s on my head as two skin appendages, comes with the package. I don’t want to argue the point. Tomorrow it changes, gone, abstract, new places—

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moving on. Is this some old-time weird Odysseus trip sans paddle—up the endless creek? Thinking of you, baby, thinking of all the things I’d like to say and do. Old-fashioned time it takes to be anywhere, at all. Moving on. Mr. Ocean, Mr. Sky’s got the biggest blue eyes in creation— here comes the sun! While we can, let’s do it, let’s have fun.

Cebu Magellan was x’ed here but not much now left, seemingly, of that event but for hotel’s name— and fact of boats filling the channel. And the churches,

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of course, as Mexico, as all of Central and South America. Driving in from the airport, hot, trying to get bearings— witness easy seeming pace of the place, banana trees, mangos, the high vine grapes on their trellises. But particularly the people moseying along. Also the detention home for boys, and another casual prison beside the old airport now used for light planes. I saw in a recent paper a picture of a triangular highrise in Chicago, downtown, a new prison there, looking like a modern hotel. Also in Singapore there are many, many new buildings— crash housing for the poor, that hurtles them skyward off the only physical thing they had left. Wild to see clotheslines, flapping shirts, pants, dresses, something like thirty stories up! I’d choose, no doubt dumbly, to keep my feet on the ground—

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and I like these houses here, open-sided, thatched roofed— that could all be gone in a flash, or molder more slowly back into humus. One doesn’t finally want it all forever, not stopped there, in abstract time. Whatever, it’s got to be yielded, let go of, it can’t live any longer than it has to. Being human, at times I get scared, of dying, growing old, and think my body’s possibly the exception to all that I know has to happen. It isn’t, and some of those bananas are already rotten, and no doubt there are vacant falling-down houses, and boats with holes in their bottoms no one any longer cares about. That’s all right, and I can dig it, yield to it, let what world I do have be the world. In this room the air-conditioner echoes the southwest of America—

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my mother-in-law’s, in Albuquerque, and I wonder what she’s doing today, and if she’s happy there, as I am here, with these green walls, and the lights on, and finally loving everything I know.

Morning Dam’s broke, head’s a waterfall.

Hong Kong Window Seemingly awash in this place, here— egocentric abstraction— no one else but me again, and people, people as if behind glass, close

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but untouchable. What was the world I’d thought of, who was to be there? The buildings lean in this window, hotel’s abstraction, cars like toys pass, below, fourteen stories down on those streets. In park kids wade in a pool. Grey day, in spring, waits for rain. “What’s the question?” Who asks it, which me of what life.

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Things to Do in Tokyo FOR TED BERRIGAN

Wake up. Go to sleep. Sit zazen five days in five minutes. Talk to the beauty next to me on plane, going to San Francisco. Think it’s all a dream. Return “passport, wallet and ticket” to man I’d taken them from. No mistakes. This time. Remember mother ashed in an instant. No tears. No way, other than this one. Wander. Sing songs from memory. Tell classical Chinese poet Bob Dylan’s the same. Sit again in air. Be American. Love. Eat Unspeakable Chicken— “old in vain.” Lettuce, tomato—

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bread. Be humble. Think again. Remy Martin is Pete Martin’s brother? Drink. Think of meeting Richard Brautigan, and brandy, years ago. (All the wonder, all the splendor, of Ezra Pound!) Don’t be dismayed, don’t be cheap. No Hong Kong, no nothing. Be on the way to the way to the way. Every day’s happy, sad. “That’s the way” to think. Love people, all over. Begin at the beginning, find the end. Remember everything, forget it. Go on, and on. Find ecstasy, forget it. Eat chicken entirely,

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recall absent friends. Love wife by yourself, love women, men, children. Drink, eat “and be merry.” Sleep when you can. Dogs possibly human?— not cats or birds. Let all openings be openings. Simple holes. Virtue is people, mind’s eye in trees, sky above, below’s water, earth. Keep the beat Confucian—“who controls.” Think man’s possibly beauty’s brother, or husband. No matter, no mind. It’s here, it’s around. Sing deliberately. Love all relations, be father to daughters, sons. Respect

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wife’s previous residence in Tokyo, stories she told. All time, all mind, all worlds, can’t exist by definition— are one.

There Miles back in the wake, days faded— nights sleep seemed falling down into some deadness— killing it, thinking dullness, thinking body was dying. Then you changed it.

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Out Here People having a good time in the duty-free shop, Tokyo Airport— can you knock it. Recall Irving Layton’s classic line re his mother: “her face was flushed with bargains, etc.” Can’t finally think the world is good guys and bad guys, tho’ these creeps drive me back into this corner of the bar—but I’d choose it anyhow, sit, hoping for company. A few minutes ago I was thinking: “Fuck me, Ruby, right between the eyes!” Not any more, it’s later, and is going to get later yet ’fore I get on plane, go home, go somewhere else at least. It’s raining, outside, in this interjurisdictional headquarters. I’m spooked, tired, and approaching my fiftieth birthday. Appropriately I feel happy, and sad, at the same time. I think of

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Peter Warshall’s amulet I’ve worn round my neck for two months now— turtle, with blue bead cosmos— that’s enough. Nancy Whitefield’s childhood St. Christopher’s medal has stayed safe in the little box wherein I keep fingernail clippers, and a collar button, and several small stones I picked up on a beach. People still around but they’re fading out now to get another plane. Hostess, picking up her several fried chicken quick lunches, smiles at me, going past. Guy with spoonbill blue cap and apparently American bicentennial mottoes on front of it, orders a San Miguel beer. Now he knocks on glass door, adjacent, I guess his wife’s on the other side. Days, days and nights, and more of same— and who wins, loses, never that simple to figure out. I’ll be a long way away when you read this—and I won’t remember what I said.

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Flaubert’s Early Prose “Eventually he dies out of a lack of will to live, out of mere weariness and sadness . . .” And then he is hit by a truck on his way home from work, and/or a boulder pushed down onto him by lifelong friends of the family writes FINIS to his suffering— Or he goes to college, gets married, and then he dies! Or finally he doesn’t die at all, just goes on living, day after day in the same old way . . . He is a very interesting man, this intensively sensitive person, but he has to die somehow— so he goes by himself to the beach, and sits down and thinks, looking at the water to be found there, “Why was I born? Why am I living?”—like an old song, cheri— and then he dies.

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Love There are words voluptuous as the flesh in its moisture, its warmth. Tangible, they tell the reassurances, the comforts, of being human. Not to speak them makes abstract all desire and its death at last.

Erotica On the path down here, to the sea, there are bits of pages from a magazine, scattered, the big tits of my adolescence caught on bushes, stepped on, faces of the women, naked, still smiling out at me from the grass.

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In the factory, beside which this path goes, there is no one. The windows are broken out. A dump sits in front of it. Two piles of dirt beyond that. Do these look like tits too, some primordial woman sunk underground breaking out, up, to get me— shall I throw myself down upon it, this ground rolls and twists, these pictures I want still to see. Coming back a day later,

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kids were stopped at that spot to look as I would and had—there the fact of the mystery at last— “what they look like underneath”— paper shreds, blurred pages, dirty pictures.

End End of page, end of this company—wee notebook kept my mind in hand, let the world stay open to me day after day, words to say, things to be.

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I Love You I see you, Aunt Bernice— and your smile anticipating reality. I don’t care any longer that you’re older. There are times all the time the same. I’m a young old man here on earth, sticks, dust, rain, trees, people. Your cat killing rats in Florida was incredible— Pete—weird, sweet presence. Strong. You were good to me. You had wit— value beyond all other human possibility. You could smile at the kids, the old cars. Your house in N.H. was lovely.

Theresa’s Friends From the outset charmed by the soft, quick speech of those men and women, Theresa’s friends—and the church she went to, the “other,” not the white plain Baptist I tried to learn God in. Or, later, in Boston the legend of “being Irish,” the lore, the magic, the violence, the comfortable or uncomfortable drunkenness. But most, that endlessly present talking,

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as Mr. Connealy’s, the ironmonger, sat so patient in Cronin’s Bar, and told me sad, emotional stories with the quiet air of an elder does talk to a younger man. Then, when at last I was twenty-one, my mother finally told me indeed the name Creeley was Irish— and the heavens opened, birds sang, and the trees and the ladies spoke with wondrous voices. The power of the glory of poetry—was at last mine.

Later 1 Shan’t be winding back in blue gone time ridiculous, nor lonely anymore. Gone, gone—wee thin delights, hands held me, mouths winked with white clean teeth. Those clothes have fluttered their last regard

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to this passing person walks by that flat backyard once and for all. 2 You won’t want to be early for passage of grey mist now rising from the faint river alongside the childhood fields. School bell rings, to bring you all in again. That’s mother sitting there, a father dead in heaven, a dog barks, steam of drying mittens on the stove, blue hands, two doughnuts on a plate. 3 The small spaces of existence, sudden smell of burning leaves makes place in time these days (these days) passing,

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common to one and all. 4 Opening the boxes packed in the shed, at the edge of the porch was to be place to sit in the sun, glassed over, in the winter for looking out to the west, see the shadows in the early morning lengthen, sharp cold dryness of air, sounds of cars, dogs, neighbors, persons of house, toilet flush, pan rattle, door open, never done.

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5 Eloquent, my heart, thump bump— My Funny Valentine 6 If you saw dog pass, in car— looking out, possibly indifferently, at you— would you—could you— shout, “Hey, Spot! It’s me!” After all these years, no dog’s coming home again. Its skin’s moldered through rain, dirt, to dust, hair alone survives, matted tangle. Your own, changed, your hair, greyed, your voice not the one used to call him home, “Hey, Spot!” The world’s greatest dog’s got

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lost in the world, got lost long ago. 7 Oh sadness, boring preoccupation— rain’s wet, clouds pass. 8 Nothing “late” about the “no place to go” old folks— or “hell,” or “Florida this winter.” No “past” to be inspired by “futures,” scales of the imperium, wonders of what’s next. When I was a kid, I thought like a kid— I was a kid, you dig it. But a hundred and fifty years later, that’s a whole long time to wait for the train. No doubt West Acton

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was improved by the discontinuance of service, the depot taken down, the hangers-around there moved at least back a street to Mac’s Garage. And you’ll have to drive your own car to get to Boston—or take the bus. These days, call it “last Tuesday,” 1887, my mother was born, and now, sad to say, she’s dead. And especially “you” can’t argue with the facts. 9 Sitting up here in newly constituted attic room ’mid pipes, scarred walls, the battered window adjacent looks out to street below. It’s fall, sign woven in iron rails of neighbor’s porch: “Elect Pat Sole.” O sole mio, mother, thinking of old attic, West Acton farmhouse, same treasures here, the boxes,

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old carpets, the smell. On wall facing, in chalk: KISS ME.

I love you. Small world of these pinnacles, places ride up in these houses like clouds, and I’ve come as far, as high, as I’ll go. Sweet weather, turn now of year . . . The old horse chestnut, with trunk a stalk like a flower’s, gathers strength to face winter. The spiked pods of its seeds start to split, soon will drop. The patience, of small lawns, small hedges, papers blown by the wind, the light fading, gives way to the season. School’s started again. Footsteps fall on sidewalk down three stories. It’s man-made endurance I’m after, it’s love for the wear and the tear here, goes under, gets broken, but stays.

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Where finally else in the world come to rest— by a brook, by a view with a farm like a dream—in a forest? In a house has walls all around it? There’s more always here than just me, in this room, this attic, apartment, this house, this world, can’t escape. 10 In testament to a willingness to live, I, Robert Creeley, being of sound body and mind, admit to other preoccupations— with the future, with the past. But now— but now the wonder of life is that it is at all, this sticky sentimental

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warm enclosure, feels place in the physical with others, lets mind wander to wondering thought, then lets go of itself, finds a home on earth.

The Place . . . Swoop of hawk— or mind’s adjustment to sight—memory? Air unrelieved, unlived? Begun again, begin again the play of cloud, the lift of sudden cliff, the place in place— the way it was again. Go back a day, take everything, take time and play it back again, the staggering path, ridiculous, uncertain bird, blurred, fuzzy

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fog—or rocks which seem to hang in imperceptible substance there, or here, in thought? This thinking is a place itself unthought, which comes to be the world.

Desultory Days FOR PETER WARSHALL

Desultory days, time’s wandering impermanences— like, what’s for lunch, Mabel? Hunks of unwilling meat got chopped from recalcitrant beasts? “No tears for this vision”— nor huge strawberries zapped from forlorn Texas, too soon, too soon . . . We will meet again one day, we will

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gather at the river (Paterson perchance) so turgidly oozes by, etc. Nothing new in the world but us, the human parasite eats up that self-defined reality we talked about in ages past. Now prophecy declares, got to get on with it, back to the farm, else die in streets inhuman ’spite we made them every one. Ah friends, before I die, I want to sit awhile upon this old world’s knee, yon charming hill, you see, and dig the ambient breezes, make of life such gentle passing pleasure! Were it then wrong to avoid, as might be said, the heaped-up canyons of the dead— L.A.’s drear smut, and N.Y.C.’s crunched millions? I don’t know. It seems to me what can salvation be

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for less than 1% of so-called population is somehow latent fascism of the soul. What leaves behind those other people, like they say, reneges on Walter Whitman’s 19th century Mr. Goodheart’s Lazy Days and Ways In Which we might still save the world. I loved it but I never could believe it— rather, the existential terror of New England countrywoman, Ms. Dickinson: “The Brain, within its Groove Runs evenly—and true— But let a Splinter swerve— “’Twere easier for You—// To put a Current back— When Floods have slit the Hills— “And scooped a Turnpike for Themselves— And Trodden out the Mills—” moves me. My mind to me a nightmare is— that thought of days, years, went its apparent way

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without itself, with no other company than thought. So—born to die—why take everything with us? Why the meagerness of life deliberately, why the patience when of no use, and the anger, when it is? I am no longer one man— but an old one who is human again after a long time, feels the meat contract, or stretch, upon bones, hates to be alone but can’t stand interruption. Funny how it all works out, and Asia is after all how much money it costs— either to buy or to sell it. Didn’t they have a world too? But then they don’t look like us,

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do they? But they’ll get us, someone will—they’ll find us, they won’t leave us here just to die by ourselves all alone?

First Rain These retroactive small instances of feeling reach out for a common ground in the wet first rain of a faded winter. Along the grey iced sidewalk revealed piles of dogshit, papers, bits of old clothing, are the human pledges, call them, “We are here and have been all the time.” I walk quickly. The wind drives the rain, drenching my coat, pants, blurs my glasses, as I pass.

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Time FOR WILLY

Out window roof ’s slope of overlapped cedar shingles drips at its edges, morning’s still overcast, grey, Sunday— goddamn the god that will not come to his people in their want, serves as excuse for death— these days, far away, blurred world I had never believed enough. For this wry, small, vulnerable particular child, my son— my dearest and only William— I want a human world, a chance. Is it my age that fears, falters in some faith? These ripples of sound, poor useless prides of mind, name the things, the feelings? When I was young, the freshness of a single moment came to me with all hope, all tangent wonder. Now I am one, inexorably in this body, in this time. All generality? There is no one here but words, no thing but echoes.

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Then by what imagined right would one force another’s life to serve as one’s own instance, his significance be mine— wanting to sing, come only to this whining sickness . . . Up from oneself physical actual limit to lift thinking to its intent if such in world there is now all truth to tell this child is all it is or ever was. The place of time oneself in the net hanging by hands will finally lose their hold, fall. Die. Let this son live, let him live.

Self-Portrait He wants to be a brutal old man, an aggressive old man, as dull, as brutal as the emptiness around him,

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He doesn’t want compromise, nor to be ever nice to anyone. Just mean, and final in his brutal, his total, rejection of it all. He tried the sweet, the gentle, the “oh, let’s hold hands together” and it was awful, dull, brutally inconsequential. Now he’ll stand on his own dwindling legs. His arms, his skin, shrink daily. And he loves, but hates equally.

Mother’s Voice In these few years since her death I hear mother’s voice say under my own, I won’t want any more of that. My cheekbones resonate with her emphasis. Nothing of not wanting only but the distance there from common fact of others frightens me. I look out at all this demanding world

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and try to put it quietly back, from me, say, thank you, I’ve already had some though I haven’t and would like to but I’ve said no, she has, it’s not my own voice anymore. It’s higher as hers was and accommodates too simply its frustrations when I at least think I want more and must have it.

Oh Love My love is a boat floating on the weather, the water. She is a stone at the bottom of the ocean. She is the wind in the trees. I hold her in my hand and cannot lift her, can do nothing without her. Oh love, like nothing else on earth!

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The Movie Run Backward The words will one day come back to you, birds returning, the movie run backward. Nothing so strange in its talk, just words. The people who wrote them are the dead ones. This here paper talks like anything but is only one thing, “birds returning.” You can “run the movie backward” but “the movie run backward.” The movie run backward.

Bresson’s Movies A movie of Robert Bresson’s showed a yacht, at evening on the Seine, all its lights on, watched by two young, seemingly poor people, on a bridge adjacent, the classic boy and girl of the story, any one one cares to tell. So years pass, of course, but I identified with the young, embittered Frenchman,

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knew his almost complacent anguish and the distance he felt from his girl. Yet another film of Bresson’s has the aging Lancelot with his awkward armor standing in a woods, of small trees, dazed, bleeding, both he and his horse are, trying to get back to the castle, itself of no great size. It moved me, that life was after all like that. You are in love. You stand in the woods, with a horse, bleeding. The story is true.

Beyond Whether in the world below or above, one was to come to it, rejected, accepted, in some specific balance. There was to be a reckoning, a judgment unavoidable, and one would know

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at last the fact of a life lived, objectively, divinely, as it were, acknowledged in whatever faith. So that looking now for where “an ampler aether clothes the meads with roseate light,” or simply the “pallid plains of asphodel,” the vagueness, the question, goes in, discovers only emptiness—as if the place itself had been erased, was only forever an idea and could never be found nor had it been. And there was nothing ever beyond.

Sad Advice If it isn’t fun, don’t do it. You’ll have to do enough that isn’t. Such is life, like they say, no one gets away without paying and since you don’t get to keep it anyhow, who needs it.

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If If your hair was brown and isn’t now, if your hands were strong and now you falter, if your eyes were sharp and now they blur, your step confident and now it’s careful— you’ve had the world, such as you got. There’s nothing more, there never was.

Buffalo Evening Steady, the evening fades up the street into sunset over the lake. Winter sits quiet here, snow piled by the road, the walks stamped down or shoveled. The kids in the time before dinner are playing, sliding on the old ice. The dogs are out, walking, and it’s soon inside again, with the light gone. Time to eat, to think of it all.

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Winter Snow lifts it by slowing the movement expected, makes walking slower, harder, makes face ache, eyes blur, hands fumble, makes the day explicit, the night quiet, the outside more so and the inside glow with warmth, with people if you’re lucky, if world’s good to you, won’t so simply kill you, freeze you.

Oh Oh like a bird falls down out of air, oh like a disparate small snowflake melts momently.

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Oh Max FOR MAX FINSTEIN

1 Dumbass clunk plane “American Airlines” (well-named) waits at gate for hour while friend in Nevada’s burned to ash. The rabbi won’t be back till Sunday. Business lumbers on in cheapshit world of fake commerce, buy and sell, what today, what tomorrow. Friend’s dead— out of it, won’t be back to pay phoney dues. The best conman in country’s gone and you’re left in plane’s metal tube squeezed out of people’s pockets, pennies it’s made of, big bucks, nickels, dimes all the same. You won’t understand it’s forever— one time, just one time you get to play, go for broke, forever, like

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old-time musicians, Thelonious, Bud Powell, Bird’s horn with the chewed-through reed, Jamaica Plain in the ’40s —Izzy Ort’s, The Savoy. Hi Hat’s now gas station. It goes fast. Scramble it, make an omelet out of it, for the hell of it. Eat these sad pieces. Say it’s paper you wrote the world on and guy’s got gun to your head— go on, he says, eat it . . . You can’t take it back. It’s gone. Max’s dead. 2 What’s memory’s agency—why so much matter. Better remember all one can forever— never, never forget. We met in Boston, 1947, he was out of jail and just married, lived in sort of hotel-like room off Washington Street, all the lights on, a lot of them. I never

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got to know her well, Ina, but his daughter Rachel I can think of now, when she was 8, stayed with us, Placitas, wanted bicycle, big open-faced kid, loved Max, her father, who, in his own fragile way, was good to her. In and out of time, first Boston, New York later—then he showed up in N.M., as I was leaving, 1956, had the rent still paid for three weeks on “The Rose-Covered Cottage” in Ranchos (where sheep ambled o’er bridge) so we stayed, worked the street, like they say, lived on nothing. Fast flashes—the women who love him, Rena, Joyce, Max, the mensch, makes poverty almost fun, hangs on edge, keeps traveling. Israel—they catch him, he told me, lifting a bottle of scotch at the airport, tch, tch, let him stay

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(I now think) ’cause he wants to. Lives on kibbutz. So back to New Mexico, goyims’ Israel sans the plan save Max’s (“Kansas City,” “Terre Haute”) New Buffalo (friend told me he yesterday saw that on bus placard and thought, that’s it! Max’s place). People and people and people. Buddy, Wuzza, Si Perkoff, and Sascha, Big John C., and Elaine, the kids. Joel and Gil, LeRoi, Cubby, back and back to the curious end where it bends away into nowhere or Christmas he’s in the army, has come home, and father, in old South Station, turns him in as deserter, ashamed, ashamed of his son. Or the man Max then kid with his papers met nightly at Summer Street subway entrance and on Xmas he gives him a dime for a tip . . . No, old man, your son was not wrong. “America” just a vagueness, another place, works for nothing, gets along.

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3 In air there’s nowhere enough not here, nothing left to speak to but you’ll know as plane begins its descent, like they say, it was the place where you were, Santa Fe (holy fire) with mountains of blood. 4 Can’t leave, never could, without more, just one more for the road. Time to go makes me stay— Max, be happy, be good, broken brother, my man, useless words now forever. 215

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Heaven Knows Seemingly never until one’s dead is there possible measure– but of what then or for what other than the same plagues attended the living with misunderstanding and wanted a compromise as pledge one could care for any of them heaven knows, if that’s where one goes.

Hotel It isn’t in the world of fragile relationships or memories, nothing you could have brought with you. It’s snowing in Toronto. It’s four-thirty, a winter evening, and the tv looks like a faded hailstorm. The people you know are down the hall, maybe, but you’re tired, you’re alone, and that’s happy. Give up and lie down.

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Religion Gods one would have hauled out like props to shore up the invented inside-out proposals of worlds equally like shams back of a shabby curtain only let in the duped, the dumbly despairing. So flutter the dead back of the scene and along with them the possibly still living.

Massachusetts May Month one was born in particular emphasis as year comes round again. Laconic, diverse sweet May of my boyhood, as the Memorial Day Parade marches through those memories. Or else the hum and laze of summer’s sweet patterns, dragonflies, grasshoppers, ladyslippers, and ponds– School’s end. Summer’s song.

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Memories Hello, duck, in yellow cloth stuffed from inside out, little pillow.

Echo Back in time for supper when the lights

Wall I’ve looked at this wall for months, bricks faded, chipped, edge of roof fixed with icicles like teeth, arch of window opposite, blistered white paint, a trim of grey blue. Specific limit– of what? A shell of house, no one’s home,

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tenuous, damp emptiness under a leaky roof. Careless of what else, wall so close, insistent, to my own– can push with eye, thinking where one can’t go, those crushed in so-called blackness, despair. This easy admission’s no place walls can echo, real or unreal. They sit between inside and out– like in school, years ago, we saw Wall, heard Wall say, “Thus have I, Wall, my part discharged so; / And, being done, thus Wall away doth go”– Clouds overhead, patch of shifting blue sky. Faint sun.

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Après Anders HAHA

In her hair the moon, with the moon, wakes water– balloon hauls her into the blue. She fängt, she in the woods faints, finds, fakes fire, high in Erlen, oil, Earl– like a Luftschiffern, tails of high clouds up there, one says. KAPUT KASPER’S LATE LOVE

I was “kaput Kasper” in Fensterfrost, window shade auntie, mother’s faltering bundle. Blood flecks on some wind flint horizon. I knew my swollen loaf, Lauf, like, out, aus es floats, it flötete.

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Sie sagte, said the night stuck two eyes in her heart (head). I griff, grabbed, griped, in the empty holes, held on to holes unter der Stirn, under stars, the stars in the sky tonight. DEN ALTEN

Then to old Uncle Emil den du immer mimst you always missed, missed most, häng einem alten Haus in fear, hung from a rafter, a beam old Uncle Emil you immer mimst over the logical river Fluss in the truly really feuchten clay, fucked finished clay.

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LATE LOVE

Stuck in her stone hut he fights to get the window up. Her loopy Dachshunds have made off with the pupils of his eyes, like, or else now from summit to summit of whatever mountains against which he thinks he hears the stars crash, sounds truly nada in all the sad façade. AGAIN

The woman who came out of the shadow of the trees asked after a time “what time is it” her face for a second in my head was there again and I felt again as against this emptiness where also I’d been.

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Knock Knock Say nothing to it. Push it away. Don’t answer. Be grey, oblique presence. Be nothing there. If it speaks to you, it only wants you for itself and it has more than you, much more.

Song What’s in the body you’ve forgotten and that you’ve left alone and that you don’t want— or what’s in the body that you want and would die for— and think it’s all of it—

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if life’s a form to be forgotten once you’ve gone and no regrets, no one left in what you were— That empty place is all there is, and/if the face’s remembered, or dog barks, cat’s to be fed.

Stairway to Heaven Point of hill we’d come to, small rise there, the friends now separate, cars back of us by lane, the stones, Bowditch, etc., location, Tulip Path, hard to find on the shaft, that insistent rise to heaven goes down and down, with names like floors, ledges of these echoes, Charlotte, Sarah, Thomas, Annie and all, as with wave of hand I’d wanted them one way or other to come, go with them.

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Ho Ho FOR JOEL

I have broken the small bounds of this existence and am travelling south on route 90. It is approximately midnight, surrogate earth time, and you who could, can, and will never take anything seriously will die as dumb as ever while I alone in state celestial shoot forward at designed rate, speed at last unimpeded.

H’s Have Hannah’s happy health— have whatever, be here, hombre . . . Her hands upon edge of table, her eyes as dark centers, her

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two teeth—but all, her climbing, sacklike, limp, her hands outstretched, or simply out to it, her coming here, her, all of her, her words of her, Hannah, Hannie. Good girl, good. So we go on with it. So is Hannah in this world.

Plague When the world has become a pestilence, a sullen, inexplicable contagion, when men, women, children die in no sense realized, in no time for anything, a painful rush inward, isolate— as when in my childhood the lonely leper pariahs so seemingly distant were just down the street, back of drawn shades, closed doors—

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no one talked to them, no one held them anymore, no one waited for the next thing to happen—as we think now the day begins again, as we look for the faint sun, as they are still there, we hope, and we are coming.

Age Most explicit— the sense of trap as a narrowing cone one’s got stuck into and any movement forward simply wedges one more— but where or quite when, even with whom, since now there is no one quite with you— Quite? Quiet? English expression: Quait? Language of singular impedance? A dance? An

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involuntary gesture to others not there? What’s wrong here? How reach out to the other side all others live on as now you see the two doctors, behind you, in mind’s eye, probe into your anus, or ass, or bottom, behind you, the rotorooter-like device sees all up, concludes “like a worn out inner tube,” “old,” prose prolapsed, person’s problems won’t do, must cut into, cut out . . . The world is a round but diminishing ball, a spherical ice cube, a dusty joke, a fading, faint echo of its former self but remembers, sometimes, its past, sees friends, places, reflections,

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talks to itself in a fond, judgmental murmur, alone at last. I stood so close to you I could have reached out and touched you just as you turned over and began to snore not unattractively, no, never less than attractively, my love, my love—but in this curiously glowing dark, this finite emptiness, you, you, you are crucial, hear the whimpering back of the talk, the approaching fears when I may cease to be me, all lost or rather lumped here in a retrograded, dislocating, imploding self, a uselessness talks, even if finally to no one, talks and talks.

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Oh Oh stay awhile. sad, sagging flesh and bones gone brittle. Stay in place, agèd face, teeth, don’t go. Inside and out the flaccid change of bodily parts, mechanics of action, mind’s collapsing habits, all echo here in mottled skin, blurred eye, reiterated mumble. Lift to the vacant air some sigh, some sign I’m still inside.

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Eight Plus Inscriptions for Eight Bollards at 7th & Figueroa, LA FOR JAMES SURLS

What’s still here settles at the edges of this simple place still waiting to be seen.

. I didn’t go anywhere and I haven’t come back!

. You went by so quickly thinking there’s a whole world in between.

. It’s not a final distance, this here and now.

. How much I would give just to know you’re standing in whatever way here.

.

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Human eyes are lights to me sealed in this stone.

. No way to tell you anything more than this one.

. You walk tired or refreshed, are past in a moment, but saw me.

. Wish happiness most for us, whoever we are, wherever.

. If I sit here long enough, all will pass me by one way or another.

. Nothing left out, it’s all in a heap, all the people completed.

.

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Night’s eye is memory in daylight.

. I’ve come and gone from here with no effect, and now feel no use left.

. How far from where it was I’ll never know.

. You there next to the others in front of the one behind!

. No one speaks alone. It comes out of something.

. Could I think of all you must have felt? Tell me.

.

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What’s inside, what’s the place apart from this one?

. They say this used to be a forest with a lake.

. I’m just a common rock, talking.

. World’s still got four corners.

. What’s that up there looking down?

.

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You’ve got a nice face and kind eyes and all the trimmings.

. We talk like this too often someone will get wise!

“Ever Since Hitler . . .” Ever since Hitler or well before that fact of human appetite addressed with brutal indifference others killed or tortured or ate the same bodies they themselves had we ourselves had plunged into density of selves all seeming stinking one no possible way out of it smiled or cried or tore at it and died apparently dead at last just no other way out.

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Thinking I’ve thought of myself as objective, viz., a thing round which lines could be drawn— or else placed by years, the average some sixty, say, a relative number of months, days, hours and minutes. I remember thinking of war and peace and life for as long as I can remember. I think we were right. But it changes, it thinks it can all go on forever but it gets older. What it wants is rest. I’ve thought of place as how long it takes to get there and of where it then is. I’ve thought of clouds, of water in long horizontal bodies, or of love and women and the children which came after. Amazing what mind makes out of its little pictures, the squiggles and dots, not to mention the words.

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The Drunks of Helsinki Blue sky, a lurching tram makes headway through the small city. The quiet company sits shyly, avoiding its image, else talks with securing friends. This passage is through life as if in dream. We know our routes and mean to get there. Now the foetid stink of human excess, plaintive, and the person beside us lurches, yet stays stolidly there. What are the signals? Despair, loss of determinants—or a world just out of a bottle? Day after day they clutter the tram stops, fall sodden over seats and take their drunken ease in the fragile world. I think, they are the poets, the maledictive, muttering words, fingers pointing, pointing, jabbed outright across aisle to blank side of bank or the company’s skittish presence. I saw a man keep slamming the post with his fist, solid in impact, measured blows. His semblable sat slumped in front of me, a single seat. They meet across the aisle in ranting voices,

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each talking alone. In a place of so few words sparely chosen, their panegyric slabbering whine has human if unexpected resonance. They speak for us, their careful friends, the sober who scuttle from side to side in vacantly complex isolation, in a company has compact consensus, minds empty of all conclusion.

Helsinki Window FOR ANSELM HOLLO

Go out into brightened space out there the fainter yellowish place it makes for eye to enter out to greyed penumbra all the way to thoughtful searching sight of all beyond that solid red both brick and seeming metal roof or higher black beyond the genial slope I look at daily house top on my own way up to heaven.

. Same roof, light’s gone down back of it, behind the crying end of day, “I need something to do,” it’s been again those other things, what’s out there, sodden edge of sea’s

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bay, city’s graveyard, park deserted, flattened aspect, leaves gone colored fall to sidewalk, street, the end of all these days but still this regal light.

. Trees stripped, rather shed of leaves, the black solid trunks up to fibrous mesh of smaller branches, it is weather’s window, weather’s particular echo, here as if this place had been once, now vacant, a door that had had hinges swung in air’s peculiar emptiness, greyed, slumped elsewhere, asphalt blank of sidewalks, line of linearly absolute black metal fence.

. Old sky freshened with cloud bulk slides over frame of window the shadings of softened greys a light of air up out of this dense high structured enclosure of buildings top or pushed up flat of bricked roof frame I love I love the safety of small world this door frame back of me the panes of simple glass yet airy up sweep of birch trees sit in flat below all designation declaration here as clouds move so simply away.

.

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Windows now lit close out the upper dark the night’s a face three eyes far fainter than the day all faced with light inside the room makes eye reflective see the common world as one again no outside coming in no more than walls and postcard pictures place faces across that cautious dark the tree no longer seen more than black edge close branches somehow still between.

. He was at the edge of this reflective echo the words blown back in air a bubble of suddenly apparent person who walked to sit down by the familiar brook and thought about his fading life all “fading life” in tremulous airy perspect saw it hover in the surface of that moving darkness at the edge of sun’s passing water’s sudden depth his own hands’ knotted surface the sounding in himself of some other.

. One forty five afternoon red car parked left hand side of street no distinguishing feature still wet day a bicycle across the way a green doorway with arched upper window

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a backyard edge of back wall to enclosed alley low down small windows and two other cars green and blue parked too and miles and more miles still to go.

. This early still sunless morning when a chair’s creak translates to cat’s cry a blackness still out the window might be apparent night when the house still sleeping behind me seems a bag of immense empty silence and I feel the children still breathing still shifting their dreams an enigma will soon arrive here and the loved one centers all in her heavy sleeping arm out the leg pushed down bedclothes this body unseen unknown placed out there in night I can feel all about me still sitting in this small spare pool of light watching the letters the words try to speak.

. Classic emptiness it sits out there edge of hierarchic roof top it marks with acid fine edge of apparent difference it is there here here that sky so up and out and where it wants to be no birds no other thing can for a moment distract it be beyond its simple space.

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Echo Entire memory hangs tree in mind to see a bird be— but now puts stutter to work, shutters the windows, shudders, sits and mutters— because can’t go back, still can’t get out. Still can’t.

Pure Why is it pure so defeats, makes simple possibility cringe in opposition— That bubbling, mingled shit with water lifted from bathtub’s drain hole’s no

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stranger to me, nor ever in mind blurred image, words won’t say what’s asked of them. I think the world I think, wipe my relentless ass, wash hands under faucet.

It Nothing there in absence as, unfelt, it repeated itself— I saw it, felt it, wanted to belt it— Oh love, you watch, you are so “patient”— Or what word makes my malice more.

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Chain Had they told you, you were “four or more cells joined end to end,” the Latin, catena, “a chain,” the loop, the running leap to actual heaven spills at my stunned feet, pours out the imprisoning threads of genesis, oh light beaded necklace, chain round my neck, my inexorably bound birth, the sweet closed curve of fading life?

Body Slope of it, hope of it— echoes faded, what waited up late inside old desires saw through the screwed importunities. This regret? Nothing’s left. Skin’s old, story’s told—

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but still touch, selfed body, wants other, another mother to him, her insistent “sin” he lets in to hold him. Selfish bastard, headless catastrophe. Sans tits, cunt, wholly blunt— fucked it up, roof top, loving cup, sweatered room, old love’s tune. Age dies old, both men and women cold, hold at last no one, die alone. Body lasts forever, pointless conduit, floods in its fever, so issues others parturient. Through legs wide, from common hole site, aching information’s dumb tide rides to the far side.

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Your One sided battering ramm’d negligible asset carnal friend— Patience’s provision test of time nothing ventured nothing gained— In the fat doldrums of innocent aging I sat waiting— Thank god you came.

Gnomic Verses LOOP

Down the road Up the hill Into the house Over the wall Under the bed After the fact By the way Out of the woods Behind the times In front of the door Between the lines Along the path ECHO

In the way it was in the street it was in the back it was in the house it was in the room it was in the dark it was

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FAT FATE

Be at That this Come as If when Stay or Soon then Ever happen It will LOOK

Particular pleasures weather measures or Dimestore delights faced with such sights. HERE

Outstretched innocence Implacable distance Lend me a hand See if it reaches TIME

Of right Of wrong Of up Of down Of who Of how Of when Of one Of then Of if Of in Of out Of feel Of friend Of it Of now MORAL

Now the inevitable As in tales of woe The inexorable toll It takes, it takes.

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EAT

Head on backwards Face front neck’s Pivot bunched flesh Drops jowled brunch. TOFFEE

Little bit patted pulled Stretched set let cool. CASE

Whenas To for If where From in Past place Stated want Gain granted Planned or HAVE A HEART

Have heart Find head Feel pattern Be wed Smell water See sand Oh boy Ain’t life grand OH OH

Now and then Here and there Everywhere On and on

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WINTER

Season’s upon us Weather alarms us Snow riot peace Leaves struck fist. DUTY

Let little Linda allow litigation Foster faith’s fantasy famously And answer all apt allegations Handmake Harold’s homework handsomely GOTCHA

Passion’s particulars Steamy hands Unwashed warmth One night stands WEST ACTON SUMMER

Cat’s rats, Mother’s brother Vacation’s patience, loud clouds Fields far, seize trees School’s rules, friends tend Lawn’s form, barn’s beams Hay’s daze, swallows follow Sun’s sunk, moon mends Echo’s ending, begin again

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FAR “Far be it from Harry to alter the sense of drama inherent in the almighty tuxedo . . .”

“Far be it from Harry” Sit next to Mary See how the Other Follows your Mother PAT’S

Pat’s place Pattern’s face Aberrant fact Changes that FOUR’S

Four’s forms Back and forth Feel way Hindside Paper route Final chute SENTENCES

Indefatigably alert when hit still hurt. Whenever he significantly alters he falters. Wondrous weather murmured mother. Unforgettable twist in all such synthesis. Impeccably particular you always were. Laboriously enfeebled he still loved people.

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WORDS

Driving to the expected Place in mind in Place of mind in Driving to the expected HERE

You have to reach Out more it’s Farther away from You it’s here DATA

Exoneration’s face Echoed distaste Privileged repetition Makeshift’s decision—

. Now and then Behind time’s Emptied scene and Memory’s mistakes—

. You are here And there too Being but one Of you—

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SCATTER

All that’s left of coherence. ECHO AGAIN

Statement keep talking Train round bend over river into distance DOOR

Everything’s before you were here. SUMMER ’38

Nubble’s Light a sort of bump I thought— a round insistent small place not like this— it was a bluff, tip on the edge of the sea. AIR

Lift up so you’re Floating out Of your skin at The edge but Mostly up seeming Free of the ground.

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ECHOES

Think of the Dance you could do One legged man Two legged woman. THERE

Hard to be unaddressed— Empty to reflection— Take the road east— Be where it is. ECHOES

Sunrise always first— That light—is it Round the earth—what Simple mindedness. STAR

Where It is There You are

. Out there In here Now it is Was also

.

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Up where It will be And down Again

. No one Point To it Ever

Dutch Boy I’d thought boy caught stopped dike’s dripping water with finger put in hole held it all back oh hero stayed steadfast through night’s black sat waited till dawn’s light when people came repaired the leak rescued sad boy. But now I see what

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was the fact he was stuck not finger in hole was but he could not take it out feared he’d be caught be shamed blamed so sat through the night uncommonly distraught in common fright.

The Road Whatever was else or less or more or even the sinister prospect of nothing left, not this was anticipated, that there would be no one even to speak of it. Because all had passed over to wherever they go. Into the fiery furnace to be burned to ash. Into the ground,

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into mouldering skin and bone with mind the transient guest, with the physical again dominant in the dead flesh under the stones. Was this the loved hand, the mortal “hand still capable of grasping . . .” Who could speak to make death listen? One grows older, gets closer. It’s a long way home, this last walking.

Histoire de Florida You’re there still behind the mirror, brother face. Only yesterday you were younger, now you look old. Come out while there’s still time left to play.

.

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Waking, think of sun through compacted tree branches, the dense persistent light. Think of heaven, home, a heart of gold, old song of friend’s dear love and all the faint world it reaches to, it wants.

. Out over that piece of water where the sound is, the place it loops round on the map from the frontal ocean and makes a spit of land this sits on, here, flat, filled with a patent detritus left from times previous whatever else was here before become now brushy conclave thick with hidden birds, nimble, small lizards.

. Whatever, whatever. Wherever, whatever, whenever— It won’t be here anymore— What one supposes dead is, but what a simple ending,

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pain, fear, unendurable wrenched division, breakdown of presumed function, truck’s broken down again, no one left to think of it, fix it, walk on. Will one fly away on angel wings, rise like a feather, lift in the thin air— But again returned, preoccupied, he counts his life like cash in emptying pockets. Somebody better help him.

. Remember German artist (surely “conceptual” or “happenings”) ate himself, cut bits from his body on stage while audience watched, it went well for awhile. But then he did something wrong and bled to death. The art is long to learn, life short.

. It must be anecdotal, sudden sights along the so-called way, Bunting’s advice that David Jones when he first met him had moved but once in adult life and then only when the building burned down to a place across the street. They were having tea when abruptly Jones got up, went to an easel at the far end of the room 258

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whereon a sheet of drawing paper with, in his immaculate script, a ‘t,’ added an ‘h’ to say, “I’ll have the ‘e’ by Monday!” Affections flood me, love lights light in like eyes . . .

. Your two eyes will me suddenly slay . . . Such echoes of heaven on earth in mind as if such a glass through which seen darkly such reflected truth. What words, then, if you love me, what beauty not to be sustained will separate finally dancer from dance.

. Sun meantime shining just now (now) a yellow slid oblong patch (light)

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from wide window

. But don’t get physical with me. Topper, or the Cheshire cat whose head could appear grinning in the tree. Could appear in the window. Could see in the dark.

. You still think death is a subject, or a place in time? Like halving the distance, the arrow that never gets there. I died and came back again to the very spot I’d seemingly left from, in a Raj-like hotel, Calcutta, 1944. From lunch of prawns got up and went to my room, an hour later dimly recall was on hands and knees crawling to quondam toilet to vomit and shit, then must have collapsed completely en route back to the bed and a long time later heard voice (hotel doctor’s, they told me) saying, must get him to hospital, he can’t die here. But I’d gone away down long faint space of path

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or up, or simply out, was moving away into a reassuring distance of somewhere (heaven? I don’t think so— My temperature was 96 etc. Délires! Whatever— Wherever had come to, gone to, I wasn’t there.

. Leary at Naropa for celebration of Kerouac I remember saying, it’s dumb to die— It’s for squares! Gregory thought it a dumb thing to say to the young. Was it metaphysical? Did he mean something else. Whether with drugs or not, be rid of such terminal dependence? As if, and why not, closure were just fact of a clogged pipe, all coming to naught? Get it out. Open up? —But the syntax would be, “What proceeds and what follows,” in Pound’s phrase, like a river, the emptying sounds of paradise.

.

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In pajamas still late morning sun’s at my back again through the window, figuring mind still, figuring place I am in, which is me, solipsistic, a loop yet moving, moving, with these insistent proposals of who, where, when, what’s out there, what’s in, what’s the so-called art of anything, hat, house, hand, head, heart, and so on, quickly banal. Always reflections. No light on the water, no clouds lifting, bird’s flap taking off— Put the food in mouth, feel throat swallowing, warmth is enough. Emotions recollected in tranquility . . . which is what? Feelings now are not quiet, daughter’s threatened kidneys, sister’s metal knee replacement, son’s vulnerable neighborhood friendships, Penelope’s social suitors, whom I envy, envy. Age. Age. Locked in my mind, my body, toes broken, skin wrinkling up, look to the ceiling where, through portals of skylight, two rectangular glass boxes in the stained wood, the yellow light comes, an outside is evident. There is no irony, no patience. There is nothing to wait for that isn’t here, and it will happen. Happiness is thus lucky. Not I but the wind that blows through me.

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Another day. Drove to beach, parked the car on the edge of the road and walked up on the wooden ramp provided, then stopped just before the steps down to the sand and looked out at the long edge of the surf, the sun glitter, the backdrop of various condominiums and cottages, the usual collective of people, cars, dogs and birds. It was sweet to see company, and I was included. Yet Crusoe— Whose mind was that, Defoe’s? Like Kafka’s Amerika, or Tom Jones come to London. Or Rousseau, or Odysseus— One practices survival much as we did when kids and would head for the woods with whatever we could pilfer or elders gave us, doughnuts, cookies, bread— Even in one’s own terror, one is proud of a securing skill. But what so turned things to pain, and if Mandelstam’s poem is found scratched on cell wall in the gulag by anonymous hand, and that’s all of either we know— Why isn’t that instance of the same side of world Robinson Crusoe comes to, footprint on sand a terror, person finally discovered an adversary he calls “Friday,” who then he learns “to be good”—

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But I wouldn’t, I can’t now know or resolve when it all became so singular, when first that other door closed, and the beach and the sunlight faded, surf ’s sounds grew faint, and one’s thoughts took over, bringing one home.

. At a dinner in Kuala Lumpur where I was the guest together with a sewerage expert had most recently worked in Saudi Arabia where drainage was the problem, and here it was the same, we talked of conveniences, shopping malls, suburbs, and what had been hauled over from stateside habit, the bars and people, while just down the street was what the Kuala Lumpurians called The Backside of Hell, a short alley of small doorways and open stalls. They said here anything was possible.

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Meantime in our hotel lobby they had dyed some chicks a weird bluish pink and put them in a little cage out front for Easter. It’s always one world if you can get there.

. HISTOIRE DE FLORIDA

Old persons swinging their canted metal detectors, beach’s either end out of sight beyond the cement block highrises, occasional cars drifting by in the lanes provided, sheer banks of the dunes bulkheaded by bulldozers, there a few cars backed up, parked. People walk by or stretch out on cots, turning in the sun’s heat, tanning. The line of the surf at some distance, small, the white edge of breakers where the surfers cluster. On the far horizon, east, is bulk of a freighter, to the north, tower of a lighthouse across the inlet. Back of it all the town sells the early tourists, the stores filling with elderly consumers. The old are gathering for an old-time ritual. One knows that in the waters hereabouts, in a particular spring, Ponce de Leon staggered in so as to live forever. But poisoned with infection from a local’s arrow and conned by the legend of eternal youth, he’d led all his people into a bloody cul-de-sac and ended himself being fed to alligators ate him skin and bones, leaving no trace.

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So it may be we all now look for where the first of these old folks went down, seeing his own face in the placid creek, hearing the far-off murmur of the surf, feeling his body open in the dark, the warmth of the air, the odor of the flowers, the eternal maiden waiting soft in her bower.

. This is the lovely time of late afternoon when the sun comes in through slatted blinds. The large glass panes show streaks in the dust. Bushy laurel’s green leaves turn golden beyond. I hear plane pass over high in the sky, see flowers in vase tremble with table’s movement. Company’s become room’s quiet hum. This hanging silence fills with sound.

. Determined reading keeps the mind’s attention off other things, fills the hole in symbolic stocking

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now that Xmas approaches— a truck through proverbial night, the buzzes, roars, of silence I hear here all alone. Poor, wee Robbie! Flickering light in small window, meager head and heart in hand, I recall William Bartram somewhere in 18th century Florida on night not unlike this one, after he’d hauled his skiff up on shore, then laid down, so he wrote, to sleep when sudden uproar, thumpings, bangings, poundings! all seeming very close, awakened him to possibility he was going to die. But, stalwart, checked it out to find an alligator had clambered up and over the gunnels of his boat to get dead fish Bartram had left inside— and all was finally well. He drew great pictures of “the natives,” looking like quaint 18th century English persons in beguiling states of undress.

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He had a heart I wish I had. My car is parked in the driveway. My door is locked. I do not want to go outside.

. What was resistance. How come to this. Wasn’t body’s package obvious limit, could I fly, could I settle, could I even be I . . . And for what want, watching man die on tv in Holland, wife sitting by. She said, “He’s going off alone for the first time in our lives.” He told her, “to the stars, to the Milky Way,” relaxed, and was gone. What is Florida to me or me to Florida except so defined.

.

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You’ve left a lot out Being in doubt you left it out Your mother Aunt Bernice in Nokomis to the west and south (?) in trailer park Dead now for years as one says You’ve left them out David your son Your friend John You’ve left them out You thought you were writing about what you felt You’ve left it out Your love your life your home

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your wife You’ve left her out No one is one No one’s alone No world’s that small No life You left it out

. The shell was the apparent inclusion, that another might be here. Form, the provision, what one took, or didn’t, from another. What form did it take, what way did it matter? My mind was a supermarket or a fading neighborhood store. I couldn’t find anything anymore, or just didn’t have it. I is another . . . and another, another, blocks fading, streets fading, into an emptying distance. Who tore it down. Where was it, what was it. Where do you think you left it?

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My mother in Nokomis, Aunt Bernice in Nokomis, David in Sarasota, Mary Ann, Cecelia, Rebecca in Sarasota, John in Sarasota, or Long Island, Pen, Will and Hannah, Helen, in Buffalo— how use them simply as loci, points of reference, who made me substance? Sarah calls to say she is pregnant and that is a delicious sound— like the music Caliban hears sometimes in Prospero’s cell surrounding him.

. Rise into the air and look down and see it there, the pendant form of it, the way it goes out, alone, into an ocean, the end of a pattern suddenly extended to cover, in itself, the western reach, the gulf close beyond. Its fragile surfaces are watery, swamps to the south, to the north where its population gathers in flat cities, sandy wastes, oaks, palmetto, laurel, pine and (for me) an unidentified particularity more seen, felt, than known. Perhaps the whole place is a giant pier out into nothing, or into all that is other, all else. Miles and miles of space are here in unexpected senses,

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sky washed with clouds, changing light, long sunsets sinking across water and land, air that freshens, intimate. Endless things growing, all horizontal, an edge, a rise only of feet above the sea’s surface, or the lakes, the ponds, the rivers, all out, nothing that isn’t vulnerable, no depths, no rooted senses other than the actual fabric of roots, skin of survivals.

. I placed a jar in Tennessee, In Florida I placed a jar And round it was, upon a hill . . . And all around it grew important air . . . And tall and of a port in air. It was my first time there It took dominion everywhere. and I was far from home and scared The jar was gray and bare. in Florida, like nothing else . . . Like nothing else in Tennessee. In Florida. Like nothing else.

Credo Creo que si . . . I believe it will rain tomorrow . . . I believe the son of a bitch is going into the river . . . I believe All men are created equal —By your leave a leafy

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shelter over the exposed person— I’m a believer creature of habit but without out there a void of pattern older older the broken pieces no longer salvageable bits but incommensurate chips yet must get it back together. In God we trust emptiness privilege will not not perish perish from this earth— In particular echo of inside pushes at edges all these years collapse in slow motion. The will to believe, the will to be good, the will to want a way out— Humanness, like you, man. Us—pun for once beyond reflective mirror of brightening prospect?

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I believe what it was was a hope it could be somehow what it was and would so continue. A plank to walk out on, fair enough. Jump! said the pirate. Believe me if all those endearing young charms . . . Here, as opposed to there, even in confusions there seems still a comfort, still a faith. I’d as lief not leave, not go away, not not believe. I believe in belief . . . All said, whatever I can think of comes from there, goes there. As it gets now impossible to say, it’s your hand I hold to, still your hand.

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Old Story Like kid on float of ice block sinking in pond the field had made from winter’s melting snow so wisdom accumulated to disintegrate in conduits of brain in neural circuits faded while gloomy muscles shrank mind padded the paths its thought had wrought its habits had created till like kid afloat on ice block broken on or inside the thing it stood or was forsaken.

Goodbye Now I recognize it was always me like a camera set to expose itself to a picture or a pipe through which the water might run

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or a chicken dead for dinner or a plan inside the head of a dead man. Nothing so wrong when one considered how it all began. It was Zukofsky’s Born very young into a world already very old . . . The century was well along when I came in and now that it’s ending, I realize it won’t be long. But couldn’t it all have been a little nicer, as my mother’d say. Did it have to kill everything in sight, did right always have to be so wrong? I know this body is impatient. I know I constitute only a meager voice and mind. Yet I loved, I love. I want no sentimentality. I want no more than home.

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The Dogs of Auckland 1 Curious, coming again here, where I hadn’t known where I was ever, following lead of provident strangers, around the corners, out to the edges, never really looking back but kept adamant forward disposition, a Christian self-evident resolve, small balloon of purpose across the wide ocean, friends, relations, all left behind. Each day the sun rose, then set. It must be the way life is, like they say, a story someone might have told me. I’d have listened. Like the story Murray recalled by Janet Frame in which a person thinks to determine what’s most necessary to life, and strips away legs, arms, trunk— to be left with a head, more specifically, a brain, puts it on the table, and a cleaning woman comes in, sees the mess and throws it into the dustbin. Don’t think of it, just remember? Just then there was a gorgeous light on the street there, where I was standing, waiting for the #005 bus at the end of Queen Street, just there on Customs, West—dazzling sun, through rain. “George is /gorgeous / George is . . .” So it begins.

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2 Almost twenty years ago I fled my apparent life, went off into the vast Pacific, though it was only miles and miles in a plane, came down in Auckland Airport, was met by Russell Haley— and he’s still here with Jean, though they’ve moved to the east coast a few hours away, and Alan Loney is here as ever my friend. And Wystan, whose light I might see there across the bay, blinking. And Alistair Paterson is here with a thirtyfour-foot boat up the harbor—as in comes the crew of Black Magic with the America’s Cup, in their yellow slickers, the cars moving down Queen Street, the crowd there waiting some half million— in the same dazzling light in which I see tiny, seemingly dancing figures at the roof ’s edge of the large building back of the square, looking down. How to stay real in such echoes? How be, finally, anywhere the body’s got to? You were with friends, sir? Do you know their address . . . They walk so fast through Albert Park. Is it my heart causes these awkward, gasping convulsions? I can mask the grimace with a smile, can match the grimace with a smile. I can. I think I can. Flooded with flat, unyielding sun, the winter beds of small plants form a pattern, if one looks, a design. There is Queen Victoria still, and not far from her the statue of a man. Sit down, sit down.

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3 ( for Pen) Scale’s intimate. From the frame and panes of the fresh white painted windows in the door, to the deck, second floor, with its white posts and securing lattice of bars, but nothing, nothing that would ever look like that, just a small porch, below’s the garden, winter sodden, trampoline, dark wet green pad pulled tight, a lemon tree thick with fruit. And fences, backyards, neighbors surrounding, in all the sloping, flattened valley with trees stuck in like a kid’s picture, palms, Norfolk pine, stubby ones I can’t name, a church spire, brownish red at the edge of the far hill, also another prominent bald small dome, both of which catch the late sun and glow there near the head of Ponsonby Road. The Yellow Bus stops up the street, where Wharf comes into Jervois Road, off Buller to Bayfield, where we are. I am writing this, sitting at the table, and love you more and more. When you hadn’t yet got here, I set to each morning to learn “New Zealand” (I thought) as if it were a book simply. I listened to everyone. Now we go to bed as all, first Will and Hannah, in this rented house, then us, lie side by side, reading. Then off with the light and to sleep, to slide close up to one another, sometimes your bottom tucked tight against my belly or mine lodged snug in your lap. Sweet dreams, dear heart, till the morning comes.

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4 Back again, still new, from the south where it’s cold now, and people didn’t seem to know what to do, cars sliding, roads blocked with snow, walk along here through the freshening morning down the wet street past green plastic garbage bins, past persistent small flowering bushes, trees. Like the newcomer come to town, the dogs bark and one on a porch across from the house where we live makes a fuss when I turn to go in through the gate. Its young slight mistress comes out as if in dream, scolds the sad dog, cuffing it with shadowy hands, then goes back in. I wonder where sounds go after they’ve been, where light once here is now, what, like the joke, is bigger than life and blue all over, or brown all over, here where I am. How big my feet seem, how curiously solid my body. Turning in bed at night with you gone, alone here, looking out at the greyish dark, I wonder who else is alive. Now our bus lumbers on up the hill from the stop at the foot of Queen Street— another late rain, a thick sky—past the laboring traffic when just across at an intersection there’s another bus going by, its windows papered with dogs, pictures of dogs, all sizes, kinds and colors, looking real, patient like passengers, who must be behind sitting down in the seats. Stupid to ask what things mean if it’s only to doubt them. That was a bus going elsewhere? Ask them.

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5 Raining again. Moments ago the sky was a grey lapping pattern towards the light at the edges still, over Auckland, at the horizon. It’s closed in except for the outline of a darker small cloud with pleasant, almost lacelike design laid over the lighter sky. Things to do today. Think of Ted Berrigan, friends absent or dead. Someone was saying, you don’t really know where you are till you move away— “How is it far if you think it.” I have still the sense I’ve got this body to take care of, a thing someone left me in mind as it were. Don’t forget it. The dogs were there when I went up to the head of the street to shop for something to eat and a lady, unaggressively but particular to get there, pushes in to pay for some small items she’s got, saying she wants to get back to her house before the rain. The sky is pitch-black toward the creek. She’s there as I pass with my packages, she’s stopped to peer into some lot has a board enclosure around it, and there are two dogs playing, bouncing up on each other. Should I bounce, then, in friendship, against this inquisitive lady, bark, be playful? One has no real words for that. Pointless otherwise to say anything she was so absorbed.

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6 I can’t call across it, see it as a piece, am dulled with its reflective prospect, want all of it but can’t get it, even a little piece here. Hence the dogs, “The Dogs of Auckland,” who were there first walking along with their company, seemed specific to given streets, led the way, accustomed. Nothing to do with sheep or herding, no presence other than one cannily human, a scale kept the city particular and usefully in proportion. When I was a kid I remember lifting my foot up carefully, so as to step over the castle we’d built with blocks. The world here is similar. The sky so vast, so endless the surrounding ocean. No one could swim it. It’s a basic company we’ve come to. They say people get to look like their dogs, and if I could, I’d have been Maggie, thin long nose, yellowish orange hair, a frenetic mongrel terrier’s delight in keeping it going, eager, vulnerable, but she’s gone. All the familiar stories of the old man and his constant companion, the dog, Bowser. My pride that Norman Mailer lists Bob, Son of Battle as a book he valued in youth as I had also. Warm small proud lonely world. Coming first into this house, from seemingly nowhere a large brown amiable dog went bounding in up the steps in front of us, plunged through various rooms and out. Farther up the street is one less secure, misshapen,

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a bit thin-haired where it’s worn, twists on his legs, quite small. This afternoon I thought he’d come out to greet me, coming home. He was at the curb as I came down and was headed toward me. Then he got spooked and barked, running, tail down, for his house. I could hear all the others, back of the doors, howling, sounding the painful alarm. 7 Empty, vacant. Not the outside but in. What you thought was a place, you’d determined by talk, and, turning, neither dogs nor people were there. Pack up the backdrop. Pull down the staging. Not “The Dogs” but The Dog of Auckland— Le Chien d’Auckland, c’est moi! I am the one with the missing head in the gully Will saw, walking up the tidal creekbed. I am the one in the story the friend told, of his Newfoundland, hit by car at Auckland city intersection, crossing on crosswalk, knocked down first, then run over, the driver anxious for repairs to his car. I am the Dog. Open the sky, let the light back in. Your ridiculous, pinched faces confound me. Your meaty privilege, lack of distinguishing measure, skill, your terrifying, mawkish dependence— You thought for even one moment it was Your World? Anubis kills!

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8 “Anubis” rhymes with Auckland, says the thoughtful humanist— at least an “a” begins each word, and from there on it’s only a matter of miles. By now I have certainly noticed that the dogs aren’t necessarily with the people at all, nor are the people with the dogs. It’s the light, backlit buildings, the huge sense of floating, platforms of glass like the face of the one at the edge of Albert Park reflects (back) the trees, for that charmed moment all in air. That’s where we are. So how did the dogs get up here, eh? I didn’t even bring myself, much less them. In the South Island a bull terrier is minding sheep with characteristic pancake-flat smile. Meantime thanks, even if now much too late, to all who move about “down on all fours” in furry, various coats. Yours was the kind accommodation, the unobtrusive company, or else the simple valediction of a look.

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The Way Somewhere in all the time that’s passed was a thing in mind became the evidence, the pleasure even in fact of being lost so quickly, simply that what it was could never last. Only knowing was measure of what one could make hold together for that moment’s recognition, or else the world washed over like a flood of meager useless truths, of hostile incoherence. Too late to know that knowing was its own reward and that wisdom had at best a transient credit. Whatever one did or didn’t do was what one could. Better at last believe than think to question? There wasn’t choice if one had seen the light, not of belief but of that soft, blue-glowing fusion seemed to appear or disappear with thought, a minute magnesium flash, a firefly’s illusion. Best wonder at mind and let that flickering ambience of wondering be the determining way you follow, which leads itself from day to day into tomorrow, finds all it ever finds is there by chance.

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(Lemons) Pear Appears If it’s there, it’s something— And when you see it, Not just your eyes know it. It’s yourself, like they say, you bring. These words, these seemingly rounded Forms—looks like a pear? Is yellow? Where’s that to be found— In some abounding meadow? Like likes itself, sees similarities Everywhere it goes. But what that means, Nobody knows.

En Famille FOR ELLIE

I wandered lonely as a cloud . . . I’d seemingly lost the crowd I’d come with, family—father, mother, sister and brothers— fact of a common blood. Now there was no one, just my face in the mirror, coat on a single hook, a bed I could make getting out of. Where had they gone?

. What was that vague determination cut off the nurturing relation with all the density, this given company— what made one feel such desperation

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to get away, get far from home, be gone from those would know us even if they only saw our noses or our toes, accept with joy our helpless mess, taking for granted it was part of us?

. My friends, hands on each other’s shoulders, holding on, keeping the pledge to be for one, for all, a securing center, no matter up or down, or right or left— to keep the faith, keep happy, keep together, keep at it, so keep on despite the fact of necessary drift. Home might be still the happiest place on earth?

. You won’t get far by yourself. It’s dark out there. There’s a long way to go. The dog knows. It’s him loves us most, or seems to, in dark nights of the soul. Keep a tight hold. Steady, we’re not lost.

. Despite the sad vagaries, anchored in love, placed in the circle, young and old, a round— love’s fact of this bond.

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One day one will look back and think of them— where they were, now gone— remember it all

. Turning inside as if in dream, the twisting face I want to be my own, the people loved and with me still, I see their painful faith. Grow, dears, then fly away! But when the dark comes, then come home. Light’s in the window, heart stays true. Call—and I’ll come to you.

. The wind blows through the shifting trees outside the window, over the fields below. Emblems of growth, of older, younger, of towering size or all the vulnerable hope as echoes in the image of these three look out with such reflective pleasure, so various and close. They stand there, waiting to hear a music they will know.

. I like the way you both look out at me. Somehow it’s sometimes hard to be a human. Arms and legs get often in the way, making oneself a bulky, awkward burden.

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Tell me your happiness is simply true. Tell me I can still learn to be like you. Tell me the truth is what we do. Tell me that care for one another is the clue.

. We’re here because there’s nowhere else to go, we’ve come in faith we learned as with all else. Someone once told us and so it is we know. No one is left outside such simple place. No one’s too late, no one can be too soon. We comfort one another, making room. We dream of heaven as a climbing stair. We look at stars and wonder why and where.

. Have we told you all you’d thought to know? Is it really so quickly now the time to go? Has anything happened you will not forget? Is where you are enough for all to share? Is wisdom just an empty word? Is age a time one might finally well have missed? Must humanness be its own reward? Is happiness this?

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Conversion to Her Parts of each person, Lumber of bodies, Heads and legs Inside the echoes— I got here slowly Coming out of my mother, Herself in passage Still wet with echoes— Little things surrounding, Little feet, little eyes, Black particulars, White disparities— Who was I then? What man had entered? Was my own person Passing pleasure? My body shrank, Breath was constricted, Head confounded, Tongue muted. I wouldn’t know you, Self in old mirror. I won’t please you Crossing over. Knife cuts through. Things stick in holes. Spit covers body. Head’s left hanging.

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Hole is in middle. Little boy wants one. Help him sing here Helpless and wanting.

. My My My My

odor? name? flesh? shame?

My other than you are, my way out— My door shut— In silence this happens, in pain.

. Outside is empty. Inside is a house of various size. Covered with skin one lives within. Women are told to let world unfold. Men, to take it, make or break it. All’s true except for you.

.

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Being human, one wonders at the others, men with their beards and anger, women with their friends and pleasure— and the children they engender together— until the sky goes suddenly black and a monstrous thing comes from nowhere upon them in their secure slumbers, in their righteous undertakings, shattering thought. One cannot say, Be as women, be peaceful, then. The hole from which we came isn’t metaphysical. The one to which we go is real. Surrounding a vast space seems boundless appetite in which a man still lives till he become a woman.

Clemente’s Images 1 Sleeping birds, lead me, soft birds, be me inside this black room, back of the white moon. In the dark night sight frightens me.

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2 Who is it nuzzles there with furred, round-headed stare? Who, perched on the skin, body’s float, is holding on? What other one stares still, plays still, on and on? 3 Stand upright, prehensile, squat, determined, small guardians of the painful outside coming in— in stuck-in vials with needles, bleeding life in, particular, heedless. 4 Matrix of world upon a turtle’s broad back, carried on like that, eggs as pearls, flesh and blood and bone all borne along. 5 I’ll tell you what you want, to say a word,

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to know the letters in yourself, a skin falls off, a big eared head appears, an eye and mouth. 6 Under watery here, under breath, under duress, understand a pain has threaded a needle with a little man— gone fishing. And fish appear 7 If small were big, if then were now, if here were there, if find were found, if mind were all there was, would the animals still save us? 8 A head was put upon the shelf got took by animal’s hand and stuck upon a vacant corpse who, blurred, could nonetheless not ever be the quietly standing bird it watched.

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9 Not lost, not better or worse, much must of necessity depend on resources, the pipes and bags brought with us inside, all the sacks and how and to what they are or were attached. 10 Everybody’s child walks the same winding road, laughs and cries, dies. That’s “everybody’s child,” the one who’s in between the others who have come and gone. 11 Turn as one will, the sky will always be far up above the place he thinks to dream as earth. There float the heavenly archaic persons of primordial birth, held in the scan of ancient serpent’s tooth, locked in the mind as when it first began. 12 Inside I am the other of a self, who feels a presence always close at hand,

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one side or the other, knows another one unlocks the door and quickly enters in. Either as or, we live a common person. Two is still one. It cannot live apart. 13 Oh, weep for me— all from whom life has stolen hopes of a happiness stored in gold’s ubiquitous pattern, in tinkle of commodious, enduring money, else the bee’s industry in hives of golden honey. 14 He is safely put in a container, head to foot, and there, on his upper part, wears still remnants of a life he lived at will— but, lower down, he probes at that doubled sack holds all his random virtues in a mindless fact. 15 The forms wait, swan, elephant, crab, rabbit, horse, monkey, cow, squirrel and crocodile. From the one sits in empty consciousness, all seemingly has come and now it goes, to regather, to tell another story to its patient mother.

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16 Reflection reforms, each man’s a life, makes its stumbling way from mother to wife— cast as a gesture from ignorant flesh, here writes in fumbling words to touch, say, how can I be, when she is all that was ever me? 17 Around and in— And up and down again, and far and near— and here and there, in the middle is a great round nothingness. 18 Not metaphoric, flesh is literal earth turns to dust as all the body must, becomes the ground wherein the seed’s passed on. 19 Entries, each foot feels its own way, echoes passage in persons,

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holds the body upright, the secret of thresholds, lintels, opening body above it, looks up, looks down, moves forward. 20 Necessity, the mother of invention, father of intention, sister to brother to sister, to innumerable others, all one as the time comes, death’s appointment, in the echoing head, in the breaking heart. 21 In self one’s place defined, in heart the other find. In mind discover I, in body find the sky. Sleep in the dream as one, wake to the others there found. 22 Emptying out each complicating part, each little twist of mind inside, each clenched fist, each locked, particularizing thought, forgotten, emptying out.

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23 What did it feel like to be one at a time— to be caught in a mind in the body you’d found in yourself alone— in each other one? 24 Broken hearts, a curious round of echoes— and there behind them the old garden with its faded, familiar flowers, where all was seemingly laced together— a trueness of true, a blueness of blue. 25 The truth is in a container of no size or situation. It has nothing inside. Worship— Warship. Sail away.

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As If As if a feeling, come from nought, Suspended time in fascinated concentration, So that all the world therein became Of that necessity its own reward— I lifted to mind a piece Of bright blue air and then another. Then clouds in fluffy substance floated by. Below I felt a lake of azure waited. I cried, Here, here I am—the only place I’ll ever be . . . Whether it made a common sense or found a world, Years flood their gate, the company dispersed. This person still is me.

Pictures FOR PEN

1 This distance between pane of glass, eye’s sight— the far waving green edge of trees, sun’s reflection, light yellow—and sky there too light blue.

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2 I will sit here till breeze, ambient, enfolds me and I lift away. I will sit here as sun warms my hands, my body eases, and sounds grow soft and intimate in my ears. I will sit here and the back of the house behind me will at last disappear. I will sit here. 3 Harry’s gone out for pizza. Mabel’s home all alone. Mother just left for Ibiza. Give the old man a bone? Remember when Barkis was willing? When onions grew on the lawn? When airplanes cost just a shilling? Where have the good times gone? 4 If one look back or thinks to look in that uselessly opaque direction, little enough’s ever there.

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What is it one stares into, thinks still to recover as it all fades out— mind’s vagary? I call to you brutally. I remember the day we met I remember how you sat, impatient to get out. Back is no direction . . . Tout passe? Life is the river we’ve carried with us. 5 Sun’s shadows aslant across opening expansive various green fields down from door here ajar on box tower’s third floor— look out on wonder. This morning. 6 I never met you afterward nor seemingly knew you before. Our lives were interfolded, wrapped like a present.

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The odors, the tastes, the surfaces of our bodies were the map— the mind a distraction, trying to keep up. I could not compare you to anything. You were not like rhubarb or clean sheets—or, dear as it might be, sudden rain in the street. All those years ago, on the beach in Dover, with that time so ominous, and the couple so human, pledging their faith to one another, now again such a time seems here— not to fear death or what’s been so given— to yield one’s own despair. 7 Like sitting in back seat, can’t see what street we’re on or what the one driving sees or where we’re going. Waiting for what’s to happen, can’t quite hear the conversation, the big people, sitting up front.

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8 Death, be not proud . . . Days be not done. Air be not gone. Head be not cowed. Bird be not dead. Thoughts be not fled. Come back instead, Heart’s hopeful wedding. Face faint in mirror. Why does it stay there? What’s become Of person who was here? 9 Wet water warm fire. Rough wood cold stone. Hot coals shining star. Physical hill still my will. Mind’s ambience alters all.

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10 As I rode out one morning just at break of day a pain came upon me unexpectedly— As I thought one day not to think anymore, I thought again, caught, and could not stop— Were I the horse I rode, were I the bridge I crossed, were I a tree unable to move, the lake would have no reflections, the sweet, soft air no sounds. So I hear, I see, tell still the echoing story of all that lives in a forest, all that surrounds me.

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Supper Shovel it in. Then go away again. Then come back and shovel it in. Days on the way, lawn’s like a shorn head and all the chairs are put away again. Shovel it in. Eat for strength, for health. Eat for the hell of it, for yourself, for country and your mother. Eat what your little brother didn’t. Be content with your lot and all you got. Be whatever they want. Shovel it in. I can no longer think of heaven as any place I want to go, not even dying. I want to shovel it in. I want to keep on eating, drinking, thinking. I am ahead. I am not dead. Shovel it in.

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“If I were writing this . . .” If I were writing this with prospect of encouragement or had I begun some work intended to be what it was or even then and there it was what had been started, even now I no longer thought to wait, had begun, had found myself in the time and place writing words which I knew, could say ring, dog, hat, car, was rushing, it felt, to keep up with the trembling impulse, the connivance the words contrived even themselves to be though I wrote them, thought they were me.

. Once in, once out Turn’s a roundabout Seeing eyes get the nod Or dog’s a mistaken god? God’s a mistaken dog? Gets you home on time Rhymes with time on time In time for two a “t” begins and ends it.

.

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A blue grey edge. Trees line it. Green field finds it. Eyes look.

. Let the aching heart take over. Cry till eyes blur. Be as big as you were. Stir the pot.

. Whenever it’s sense, look for what else is meant in the underthought of language. Words are apparent. Seen light turns off to be ambient luminescence, there and sufficient. No electricians. Same sight shadows at edge of light, green field again where hedgerow finds it. Read these words then and see the far trees, hear the chittering of the birds, share my ease and dependence.

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Emptiness FOR HELEN

The emptiness up the field where the barn sits still like an ark, an old presence I look up there to see, sun setting, sky gone a vivid streaking of reds and oranges, a sunset off over the skirt of woods where my sister’s barn sits up the field with all her determined stuff, all she brought and put in it, all her pictures, her pots, her particular books and icons—so empty, it seems, quickly emptied of everything there was in it, like herself the last time in the hospital bed had been put to face out the big window back of tv, so one could look out, see down there, over the field, trees of our place, the house, woods beyond going off toward Warren, the sight, she’d say with such emphasis, I’m where I want to be!—could ever Maine be more loved, more wanted, all our history trailing back through its desperation, our small people, small provision, where the poor folk come from like us, to Massachusetts, to a world where poverty was a class, like Mrs. Peavey told our mother she’d never felt poor before, not till she was given charity by the women of the Women’s Club, her family their annual recipient—empty, empty, running on empty, on nothing, on heart, on bits and pieces of elegance, on an exquisite frame of words, on each and every memory she ever had, on the same will as our mother’s, the pinched privacy of empty purse, the large show of pleasure, of out there

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everything, come in, come in—she lay there so still, she had gone into herself, face gone then but for echo of way she had looked, no longer saw or heard, no more of any human want, no one wanted. Go away, she might have been saying, I’m busy today. Go away. Hence then to be cremated, to reach the end and be done.

When I think When I think of where I’ve come from or even try to measure as any kind of distance those places, all the various people, and all the ways in which I remember them, so that even the skin I touched or was myself fact of, inside, could see through like a hole in the wall or listen to, it must have been, to what was going on in there, even if I was still too dumb to know anything—When I think of the miles and miles of roads, of meals, of telephone wires even, or even of water poured out in endless streams down streaks of black sky or the dirt roads washed clean, or myriad, salty tears and suddenly it’s spring again, or it was—Even when I think again of all those I treated so poorly, names, places, their waiting uselessly for me in the rain and I never came, was never really there at all, was moving so confusedly, so fast, so driven like a car along some empty highway passing, passing other cars—When I try to think of things, of what’s happened, of what a life is

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and was, my life, when I wonder what it meant, the sad days passing, the continuing, echoing deaths, all the painful, belligerent news, and the dog still waiting to be fed, the closeness of you sleeping, voices, presences, of children, of our own grown children, the shining, bright sun, the smell of the air just now, each physical moment, passing, passing, it’s what it always is or ever was, just then, just there.

“To think . . .” To think oneself again into a tiny hole of self and pull the covers round and close the mouth— shut down the eyes and hands, keep still the feet, and think of nothing if one can not think of it— a space in whose embrace such substance is, a place of emptiness the heart’s regret. World’s mind is after all an afterthought of what was there before and is there still.

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Old Song I’m feeling ok still in some small way. I’ve come too far to just go away. I wish I could stay here some way. So that what now comes wouldn’t only be more of what’s to be lost. What’s left would still leave more to come if one didn’t rush to get there. What’s still to say? Your eyes, your hair, your smile, your body sweet as fresh air, your voice in the clear morning after another night, another night, we lay together, sleeping? If that has to go, it was never here. If I know still you’re here, then I’m here too and love you, and love you.

Bye and Bye Faded in face of apparent reality— As it comes, I see it still goes on and on, and even now still sitting at this table is the smiling man who nobody seems to know. Older, the walls apparently get higher. No one seemingly gets to look over to see the people pointing at the sky where the old planes used to fly over. I packed my own reality in a bag and pushed it under the table, thinking to retrieve it when able some time bye and bye.

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Caves So much of my childhood seems to have been spent in rooms— at least in memory, the shades pulled down to make it darker, the shaft of sunlight at the window’s edge. I could hear the bees then gathering outside in the lilacs, the birds chirping as the sun, still high, began to drop. It was summer, in heaven of small town, hayfields adjacent, creak and croak of timbers, of house, of trees, dogs, elders talking, the lone car turning some distant corner on Elm Street way off across the broad lawn. We dug caves or else found them, down the field in the woods. We had shacks we built after battering at trees, to get branches, made tepeelike enclosures, leafy, dense and insubstanial. Memory is the cave one finally lives in, crawls on hands and knees to get into. If Mother says, don’t draw on the book pages, don’t color that small person in the picture, then you don’t unless compulsion, distraction dictate and you’re floating off

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on wings of fancy, of persistent seeing of what’s been seen here too, right here, on this abstracting page. Can I use the green, when you’re done? What’s that supposed to be, says someone. All the kids crowd closer in what had been an empty room where one was trying at least to take a nap, stay quiet, to think of nothing but oneself.

. Back into the cave, folks, and this time we’ll get it right? Or, uncollectively perhaps, it was a dark and stormy night he slipped away from the group, got his mojo working and before you know it had that there bison fast on the wall of the outcrop. I like to think they thought, though they seemingly didn’t, at least of something, like, where did X put the bones, what’s going to happen next, did she, he or it really love me? Maybe that’s what dogs are for, but there’s no material surviving pointing to dogs as anyone’s best friend, alas. Still here we are no matter, still hacking away, slaughtering what we can find to, leaving far bigger footprints than any old mastodon.

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You think it’s funny? To have prospect of being last creature on earth or at best a company of rats and cockroaches? You must have a good sense of humor! Anyhow, have you noticed how everything’s retro these days? Like, something’s been here before— or at least that’s the story. I think one picture is worth a thousand words and I know one cave fits all sizes.

. Much like a fading off airplane’s motor or the sound of the freeway at a distance, it was all here clearly enough and no one goes lightly into a cave, even to hide. But to make such things on the wall, against such obvious limits, to work in intermittent dark, flickering light not even held steadily, all those insistent difficulties. They weren’t paid to, not that we know of, and no one seems to have forced them. There’s a company there, tracks of all kinds of people, old folks and kids included. Were they having a picnic? But so far in it’s hardly a casual occasion, flat on back with the tools of the trade necessarily close at hand. Try lying in the dark

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on the floor of your bedroom and roll so as you go under the bed and ask someone to turn off the light. Then stay there, until someone else comes. Or paint up under on the mattress the last thing you remember, dog’s snarling visage as it almost got you, or just what you do think of as the minutes pass.

. Hauling oneself through invidious strictures of passage, the height of the entrance, the long twisting cramped passage, mind flickers, a lamp lit flickers, lets image project what it can, what it will, see there war as wanting, see life as a river, see trees as forest, family as others, see a moment’s respite, hear the hidden bird’s song, goes along, goes along constricted, selfhating, imploded, drags forward in imagination of more, has no time, has hatred, terror, power. No light at the end of the tunnel.

. The guide speaks of music, the stalactites, stalagmites making a possible xylophone, and some Saturday night-like hoedown businesses, what, every three to four thousand years? One

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looks and looks and time is the variable, the determined as ever river, lost on the way, drifted on, laps and continues. The residuum is finally silence, internal, one’s own mind constricted to focus like any old camera fixed in its function. Like all good questions, this one seems without answer, leaves the so-called human behind. It makes its own way and takes what it’s found as its own and moves on.

. It’s time to go to bed again, shut the light off, settle down, straighten the pillow and try to sleep. Tomorrow’s another day and that was all thousands and thousands of years ago, myriad generations, even the stones must seem changed. The gaps in time, the times one can’t account for, the practice it all took even to make such images, the meanings still unclear though one recognizes the subject, something has to be missed, overlooked.

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No one simply turns on a light. Oneself becomes image. The echo’s got in front, begins again what’s over just at the moment it was done. No one can catch up, find some place he’s never been to with friends he never had. This is where it connects, not meaning anything one can know. This is where one goes in and that’s what’s to find beyond any thought or habit, an arched, dark space, the rock, and what survives of what’s left.

On Earth One’s here and there is still elsewhere along some road to hell where all is well— or heaven even where all the saints still wait and guard the golden gate.

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Old Story FROM THE DIARY OF FRANCIS KILVERT

One bell wouldn’t ring loud enough. So they beat the bell to hell, Max, with an axe, show it who’s boss, boss. Me, I dreamt I dwelt in some place one could relax but I was wrong, wrong, wrong. You got a song, man, sing it. You got a bell, man, ring it.

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Notes A new edition of Creeley’s Collected Essays is currently in preparation, so all quotations from his critical prose are identified by essay title as well as page reference to a currently available text. Quotations from poetry readings come from recordings archived at Penn Sound (www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Creeley.html [last accessed March 30, 2007]). Guido, i’ vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io (41). The first two lines of the poem translate the title, the opening of Dante’s sixth sonnet. The phrase sempre d’amore, “always of love,” appears in Dante’s twelfth line. Stomping with Catullus (47). Introducing the poem at a reading in San Francisco (1956), Creeley said: “This is actually the one poem of Catullus’s I can ever remember, having studied Latin a long, long time ago. The first verse . . . is a literal translation of the poem, and those that follow are variations on it, in a jazz idiom, so called.” The Catullus poem is no. 70, “Nulli se dicit mulier mea nubere malle.” After Lorca (55). In a letter to Charles Olson, Creeley explained that the poem is based on an oral recitation by one of Lorca’s childhood friends, the M. Marti of the dedication. The original version explains the title parenthetically: “After Lorca (who said this poem at a ‘Grand Concours des Poètes’ somewhere in Spain when he was 17, and everyone was pushing at him to go first, so he drank a bottle of cognac, and said it with the guitar going behind him).” Doucement, doucement is French for “sweetly, sweetly.” —Charles Olson & Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence, vol. 10, ed. Richard Blevins (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1996), 173. Ballad of the Despairing Husband (67). In an interview with Cynthia Dubin Edelberg, Creeley noted that the poem “has to do with echoes of the translations Paul Blackburn was then doing. This would be in the early fifties, and this poem, I remember, was written at Black Mountain. My first wife, Ann, and I were really at a sad distance. She was in Mallorca. We’d really determined to separate. I suppose that I was sentimentally hoping that possibly it wouldn’t happen, but I was really getting tired of my own despair.” —Edelberg, Robert Creeley’s Poetry: A Critical Introduction (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978), 167. Creeley’s own Divers Press published Blackburn’s Provençal translations, in Proensa (1953). Lines too long for the width of the type page are indented a small amount at the left margin and should be read as if they were one with the lines they follow. Heroes (71). In Book VI of the Aeneid, the Cumaean Sybil tells Aeneas: Facilis descensus Averni: Noctes atque dies patet atri janua Ditis.

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Sed revocare gradum, superasque evadere ad auras, Hoc opus, hic labor est.

Which Dryden translates as follows: The gates of hell are open night and day; Smooth the descent, and easy is the way: But to return and view the cheerful skies; In this the task and mighty labour lies.

Kore (74). The title is Greek for “maiden,” and also the name for a statue of such. The poem was inspired by reading Jane Ellen Harrison’s Prolegomena to Greek Religion, as Creeley told Robert Duncan and others in letters of the time. After Mallarmé (82). “A poem in For Love called ‘After Mallarmé’ is actually a translation of a poem of Jouvet’s which [Philip] Guston quoted to me. . . . My ‘translation’ is what I could make of the French he quoted, in my scattered recollection of it.” —Creeley, “On the Road: Notes on Artists & Poets, 1950–1965” (1974), in The Collected Essays of Robert Creeley (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 373–74. A Piece (110). “When Words was published, I was interested to see that one of the poems most irritating to reviewers was ‘A Piece’—and yet I knew that for me it was central to all possibilities of statement. . . . To count, or give account, tell or tally, continually seems to me the occasion.” —Creeley, “Contexts of Poetry” (1968), in Collected Essays, 535. “As real as thinking” (111). The sentence beginning “it was” opens the short story “It Was” by Louis Zukofsky, to whom the book Pieces was dedicated. (“As real as thinking” is the opening poem of that book.) The entire sentence reads, “It was fine weather in mid-August when I awoke anxious to go on writing the story that in the dark hours did not let me rest” (Louis Zukofsky, Collected Fiction [Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990], 179). Numbers (119). In conversation with Michael André, Creeley noted: “That poem was written on the suggestion of a friend, Robert Indiana. He at first asked if he might use a selection of poems that were published to accompany this sequence of numbers from one to zero. I thought, wow, what would be far more interesting from my point of view would be to try to write a sequence of poems involved with the experiences of numbers. In some halfhearted sense I looked up texts on numbers and got some information that way but it was immediately so scholastic and scholarly in tone that I couldn’t use it. I was really using something as simple as ‘what do you think of when you think of the number eight; is that a pleasant number for you?’ I was think-

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ing of sayings like ‘two’s company, three’s a crowd.’ I was thinking of the groupings implied or the imbalances implied or the odd numbers, the even numbers. Then other writing, like the last part of the zero sequence called ‘The Fool,’ is simply a quote from a text by Arthur Waite called A Pictorial Key to the Tarot. I just looked at that because it was a beautiful estimation of the experience of nothing.”—Tales out of School: Selected Interviews (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 111. As We Sit (158). After reading this poem at Goddard College (1973), Creeley remarked: “I’m trying to think of what is the . . . no, I’m not trying to think of anything, I’m just trying to state the experience of being someplace.” One Day (160). In an essay on film, Creeley wrote, “So—one thing after another, and what that factor has as powers. . . . Have you ever played that game with others, where a piece of paper is folded, then one of the company begins a drawing, leaving a little bit of its line visible on another face of the fold adjacent, so that the next person continues the drawing with only those edges of line as a locus—and so on, till the paper is exhausted? Then the paper is opened up to show the whole ‘image’—and it is provocative because no one could anticipate what the image so constructed would be. The congruence, rather the contiguity there used seems to me a very sturdy element in either film or poetry, and in human life as it is consciously experienced: ‘One day after another. / Perfect. / They all fit.’ ”—Creeley, “Three Films” (1978), in Collected Essays, 409–10. So There (169). Written in Auckland, New Zealand, March 26, 1976. The poem celebrates Creeley’s first meeting with Penelope Highton—the two would be married the following year. Of his aunt Bernice (addressed directly in I Love You [187]), Creeley told Tom Clark: “My mother’s older sister, my aunt Bernice, was . . . endlessly, really wittily quotable. . . . She used to write these poems and publish them in the Boston paper. She would do lovely parodies of the classics of the moment, whether Housman or whomever. She was a parodist. She would also take the formal patterns of poems which she did like, and shift them to her own interest. She was a classic occasional poet. You know, there’s my poem for Penelope, ‘So There,’ where it says, ‘My Aunt Bernice / in Nokomis, / Florida’s last act, / a poem for Geo. Washington’s / birthday. Do you want to say “it’s bad”?’ You want to fight? I mean, she’d kill you!”—Tom Clark, Robert Creeley and the Genius of the American Common Place (New York: New Directions, 1993), 27. Out Here (181). Of the experience of moving quickly across countries that produced this and the other poems in Hello, Creeley noted (in an unpublished letter to John R. Morgan), “The abstraction of ‘world’ that such travel creates is just staggering, e.g., five major cities in Japan in as many days after simi-

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lar situations in seven previous countries. Do you know what that does to any sense one might have of being a person of a community? No wonder people are brought to say, ‘Hello there, fellow American!’ And ‘we’ of course are no such ‘community’ to begin with.” I Love You (187). See note to So There (323). Theresa’s Friends (187). In conversation with Tom Clark, Creeley noted: “There was also this other crucial woman in the household, Theresa Turner, who was the housekeeper. She was an immigrant Irishwoman from County Cork. . . . Theresa’s presence went back to my father’s provision, in a sense. He’d found her in a home for mentally displaced people, and realized that her problem was, not so much any incapability, but that she was just shocked, in social terms, by the fact of immigration at the age of eighteen. And he offered her a job in the household, as a maid.” —Creeley and the American Common Place, 25. Later (188). In Later (1979), the poem’s ten sections are each titled “Later,” followed by section number, and the poem as a whole ends with the following three lines set to the right side of the page: —400 Fargo Buffalo, N.Y. Sept. 3rd – 13th, 1977—

The present text follows the one established by Creeley for his 1991 Selected Poems. Buffalo Evening (209). Introducing this poem in a note to students at City Honors School in Buffalo, NY, Creeley wrote, “I have frankly always loved winter, for its silence, its clarity, its concentration. Looking at a book of mine now out of print (which is a lesson for the ego if nothing else), Mirrors, there’s a part writ while living by myself (family was away visiting far off relatives down under) off the bend of Summer Street beyond Richmond, in a small brick cottage up a sort of mews-like lane so that we were just under the rear end of the great surviving livery stable on jersey. Anyhow here’s a poem from that time.”—Creeley, Day Book of a Virtual Poet (New York: Spuyten Duyvil, 1998), 45. Oh Max (211). In Mirrors (1983), the poem ends with the following three lines set to the right side of the page: —for Max Finstein died circa 11:00 a.m. driving truck (Harvey Mudd’s) to California — near Las Vegas — 3/17/82.

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Massachusetts May (217). “My own birthday is May 21, just on the cusp as my mother would say, so that I presume I’m a stubborn (Taurean) Gemini (which dear Allen Ginsberg also was, and Shakespeare, and Bob Dylan).” — Creeley, Day Book of a Virtual Poet, 79. Après Anders (220). Although après is “after” in French, “Après Anders” pays homage to the German poet Richard Anders. The individual poems making up the sequence are “parodies,” writes Creeley (in his essay “Berlin, Etc.” [1984]), of work in Anders’s Preussische Zimmer (1975), “not translations, nor even adaptations—rather free play on sounds and occasionally understood words of those texts—in homage to his own patient clarity.”—Collected Essays, 589n. Stairway to Heaven (224). A description of Mount Auburn Cemetery, where Creeley himself now rests. This is the lot mentioned at the end of I (89), “the Creeley family lot with its predominant Lauries close to the Bowditch lot, a patent of some sort, however specious.”—Creeley, “Autobiography” (1989), in Creeley and the American Common Place, 123. Eight Plus (231). Written for a collaboration in 1991 with James Surls, who inscribed eight of the poems, along with iconic images, on the polished granite surfaces of eight bollards at 7th and Figueroa streets in Los Angeles. The finished piece is called Once There Was a Forest, which emphasizes a visual resemblance between the bollards and tree stumps. The poems included (and the images that accompany them) are as follows: “What’s still here settles” (a bowl), “You went by so” (a flower), “It’s not a” (a sailboat), “Human eyes” (five pairs of eyes), “If I sit here” (a rocking chair), “No one speaks” (three seashells), “They say this” (a woodpecker), “World’s” (a bed). Helsinki Window (238). Composed in Finland (1988–89), where Creeley, as a Fulbright Fellow, held the Bicentennial Chair of American Studies at the University of Helsinki. “I wrote at odd times of the day and night in the small study just off the kitchen, so that its one window faced out to the apartment block’s inner courtyard. Just up the wall to the right was a small balcony used by that apartment’s occupants to ‘beat’ rugs. Sometimes we’d catch one another looking but I don’t think we ever spoke. At the far end of the courtyard past the arching trees at its center, there was a stretch of alley where cars were sometimes parked. One could also see the face of another large apartment building there, whose windows at night would lighten or go dark in almost a curious narrative. I would imagine, sitting looking out, lives back of those windows, happy, sad, threatened, successful, always a little obscured and changing. Sometime about then I found myself using a curious form for a frame, a compacted ‘sonnet’ of sorts, which felt precisely the scale and passage of time I felt active for locating my often complex feelings about where we were. The window itself became the imaginal door

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into this world I knew was insistently there, yet so confused me when I tried to enter it. . . . Birds, persons, cats, vehicles, seasons, flotsam all found their way through it. If one twisted and looked upward, then the sky was apparent and the edges of massive roof. But there was the locating ground.”—Creeley, “Coming Home” (1997), unpublished. Your (246). “This is addressed to my extraordinarily patient . . . anyhow, forget that stuff, Bob!”—Creeley, reading the poem in Buffalo, 1991. The Dogs of Auckland (277). Creeley’s first trip to Auckland is recorded in Hello. In a note composed for the New Zealand edition of that earlier book, Creeley observed: “Coming to New Zealand in our spring (your fall) of 1976 (momently to be my fiftieth year)—I knew, intuitively, a time in myself had come for change. I don’t mean simply clothes, or houses, or even cities or countries or habits. I mean, all of it—what it ever is or can be. No doubt one’s a poor tourist, so preoccupied—but one needs specific places for specific acts, and if the demand be that one step out into space, that life as we say we presume to live, then best it be a giant step, so far from what’s known as one can manage.” Lines too long for the width of the type page are indented a small amount at the left margin and should be read as if they were one with the lines they follow. En Famille (286). Written in response to Elsa Dorfman’s photographs of families, couples, and groups of close friends; originally published by Granary Books alongside twenty-two of those photographs. The Granary text is still on view at the publisher’s website: www.granarybooks.com/books/dorfman/ dorfman2.html (last accessed March 30, 2007). “It all began by Ellie’s giving me a great batch of her portraits. . . . I was up in Maine by myself, and I put the whole sequence out on our big kitchen table, and then just sat and looked at them. Outside our place there’s a big hayfield sloping down, with woods going off on all sides. I guess that’s how Wordsworth got in there, with that opening line—and then, later, the wind. I would write two quatrains for each portrait, then move to the next—closing with old friend Bill Alfred’s wise look (now gone, alas) and his dear friend Faye Dunaway. Perhaps because I was alone there, these dear people all became my company. They certainly made me recognize that I like all much needed it.”—Creeley, unpublished note. Conversion to Her (290) and Clemente’s Images (292). Written to accompany a retrospective of work by Francesco Clemente mounted at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1999. Pictures (300). Written for a collaboration with Jim Dine, who produced twelve lithographs of tools in response; ten of these images are on view at the website for the Tamarind Institute, New Mexico, which sponsored the project: www.unm.edu/~tamarind/editions/pictures_img.html (last accessed March 30, 2007). 326

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Old Story (319). Written for Martín Espada after the 2004 presidential election, in response to a request for work; the cover letter (an e-mail) explains the poem’s genesis: Dear Martín, From the depths of whatever they are of recent national tragedy, it’s hard to be moved to song—unless it’s HELP —as ever, be it said. I had hoped to write something specific for the issue, but see that is not to happen . . . but please know I sure wanted to get something to you in any case, just dragging for the moment. Onward! —I interrupt this program to tell you I just got email from Donald Revell in which he tells me, “dear Bob, reading at the bottom of the garden in my postelection funk, I came to this passage in the tender diary of Francis Kilvert— “One bell did not ring loud enough to satisfy the people so they took an axe up to the bell and beat the bell with the axe till they beat it all to pieces.” Anyhow, it prompted this poem you are welcome to—man, you got me rolling! No kidding . . . Now back to our regular programming! Love to you all, Bob

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Credits Poems included in this volume were originally published in the following texts: The Charm. San Francisco: Four Seasons Foundation, 1969. For Love: Poems 1950–1960. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1962. Words. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1967. Pieces. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969. A Day Book. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972. Thirty Things. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1974. Backwards. Knotting, Bedfordshire: Sceptre Press, 1975. Away. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1976. Hello: A Journal, February 29–May 3, 1976. New York: New Directions, 1978. Later. New York: New Directions, 1979. Mirrors. New York: New Directions, 1983. Memory Gardens. New York: New Directions, 1986. Windows. New York: New Directions, 1990. Echoes. New York: New Directions, 1994. Life & Death. New York: New Directions, 1998. If I were writing this. New York: New Directions, 2003. On Earth. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006.

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Index of Titles and First Lines Titles appear in roman type. First lines appear in italics. A head was put, 294 A little, 110 A movie of Robert, 206 A pretty party for people, 71 Act of Love, The, 143 After Lorca, 55 After Mallarmé, 82 After, what, 100 Again (“One more day gone”), 134 Again (“The woman who”), 222 Age, 227 Air, 252 All around, 160 All night in a thoughtful, 46 All night the sound had, 75 All that’s left of coherence, 252 All you say you want, 101 Almost twenty years ago I fled my apparent life, went off, 278 America, 132 America, you ode for reality!, 132 And, 71 Anger, 95 “Anubis” rhymes with Auckland, says the thoughtful humanist—, 284 Après Anders, 220 Around and in— , 297 As I rode out one morning, 305 As I sd to my, 57 As I was walking, 74 As If, 300 As if a feeling, come from nought, 300 “As real as thinking . . . ,” 111 As soon as, 93 As We Sit, 158 Back again, still new, from the south, 280 Back in time, 218 331

Backwards, 161 Ball Game, The, 54 Ballad of the Despairing Husband, 67 Be at That this, 247 Before I die, 136 Behind things, 168 Beyond, 207 Billfold, 157 Birds, The, 146 Blue sky, a lurching tram makes, 237 Body, 244 Bresson’s Movies, 206 Broken heart, you, 159 Broken hearts, a curious round of echoes—, 299 Buffalo Evening, 209 Business, The, 59 Bye and Bye, 312 Can’t leave, never could, 215 Case, 248 Cat’s rats, Mother’s brother, 249 Caves, 313 Cebu, 172 Chain, 244 Changes, The, 46 Characteristically, 157 Characteristically and other words, 157 Charm, The, 44 Chasing the Bird, 45 Clemente’s Images, 292 Comes the time when it’s later, 65 Conspiracy, The, 57 Conversion to Her, 290 Cracks, The, 77 Credo, 272 Creo que si . . . I believe, 272 Crisis, The, 53 Curious, coming again here, 277

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Da. Da. Da da., 169 Damon & Pythias, 69 Dam’s broke, 175 Data, 251 Death, be not proud . . . , 304 Death of Venus, The, 58 Den Alten, 221 Desultory Days, 197 Diction, 132 Disappointment, The, 59 Dishonest Mailmen, The, 56 Do you know what, 102 “Do You Think . . . ,” 141 Dogs of Auckland, The, 277 Don’t step, 77 Door, 252 Down the road Up the hill Into the house, 246 Driving to the expected, 251 Drunks of Helsinki, The, 237 Dumbass clunk plane “American, 211 Dutch Boy, 254 Duty, 249 Each gesture, 104 Ear, The, 51 Eat, 248 Echo (“Back in time”), 218 Echo (“Broken heart, you”), 159 Echo (“Entire memory”), 242 Echo (“In the way it was in the street”), 246 Echo Again, 252 Echoes (“Sunrise always first”), 253 Echoes (“Think of the”), 253 Eight, 126 Eight Plus, 231 Either in or out of, 114 Eloquent, 191 Emptiness, 309 Empty, vacant. Not the outside but in. What you thought was, 283

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Emptying out, 298 En Famille, 286 End, 186 End of page, 186 End of the Day, The, 80 Entire memory, 242 Entries, each foot feels its own way, 297 Erotica, 184 “Eventually he dies, 183 “Ever Since Hitler . . . ,” 235 Everybody’s child, 295 Everything’s before you, 252 Exoneration’s face, 251 Face me, 99 Faded in face of apparent reality—, 312 Faded mind, 160 Falling, 167 Falling / from grace—, 167 Family, The, 113 Fancy, 102 Far, 250 “Far be it from Harry,” 250 Farm, The, 111 Fat Fate, 247 Father, 113 Finger, The, 114 First Rain, 201 Five, 123 Flaubert’s Early Prose, 183 Flower, The, 73 For Fear, 80 For fear I want, 80 For Love, 83 For love—I would, 60 For My Mother: Genevieve Jules Creeley, 162 For No Clear Reason, 87 For Somebody’s Marriage, 46 For W. C. W., 87

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Form of Women, A, 62 Four (“Before I die”), 136 Four (“This number for me”), 122 Four’s, 250 Four’s forms, 250 Friend, The, 63 From the outset, 187 Gnomic Verses, 246 Go out into brightened, 238 Gods one would have, 217 Going to Bed, 72 Goodbye, 275 Gotcha, 249 Guido, i’ vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io, 41 H’s, 225 Had not, 139 Had they told you, you, 244 Had you the eyes of a goat, 59 Haha, 220 Hard to be unaddressed—, 253 Harry’s gone out for pizza, 301 Hart Crane, 51 Have a Heart, 248 Have Hannah’s happy health— , 225 Have heart Find head, 248 He cannot move the furniture, 51 He had been stuttering, by the edge, 51 He is safely put, 296 He wants to be, 203 Head on backwards, 248 Heaven Knows, 216 Hello, duck, 218 Helsinki Window, 238 Here (“Here is”), 159 Here (“No one”), 161 Here (“Outstretched innocence”), 247 Here (“You have to reach”), 251 Here is, 159

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Heroes, 71 Hey, 158 Hey kid, 158 Hill, The, 74 Histoire de Florida, 256 Ho Ho, 225 Hole, The, 107 Hong Kong Window, 175 Hotel, 216 I, 89 I approach with such, 90 I can’t call across it, see it as a piece, am dulled with its reflective prospect, 282 I dreamt her sensual proportions, 58 I dreamt last night, 87 I have broken, 225 I have come far enough, 62 I knew where they were, 148 I Know a Man, 57 I Love You, 187 I never met you afterward, 302 I once wrote a letter as follows, 70 I resolved it, I, 101 I see you, Aunt Bernice— , 187 I spent a night turning in bed, 61 I think I grow tensions, 73 I thought that if I were broken enough, 45 I waited too long, 50 I wandered lonely as a cloud . . . , 286 I was, 220 I will sit here, 301 Ice Cream, 135 I’d thought, 254 If, 209 “If I were writing this . . . ,” 307 If it isn’t fun, don’t do it, 208 If it’s there, it’s something—, 286 If one look back, 301

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If small were big, 294 If You, 69 If you never do anything for anyone else, 56 If you saw, 191 If you wander far enough, 65 If you were going to get a pet, 69 If your hair was brown, 209 I’ll miss the small birds that come, 146 I’ll tell you what you want, 293 I’m feeling ok still in some small way, 312 I’m going to roll up, 78 Immoral Proposition, The, 56 In a Boat Shed, 50 In air, 215 In all those stories the hero, 71 In her hair the, 220 In self one’s place defined, 298 In testament, 195 In the way it was in the street, 246 In these few years, 204 Indefatigably alert when hit still hurt, 250 Innocence, The, 54 Inside I am the other of a self, 295 Invoice, The, 70 “is the grandson, 89 Is there some odor, 98 It, 243 It is all a rhythm, 85 It is some time since I have been, 74 It isn’t in the world of, 216 It still makes sense, 77 I’ve looked at this wall, 218 I’ve thought of myself, 236 Jack’s Blues, 78 Kaput Kasper’s Late Love, 220 Kitchen, 159

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Knock Knock, 223 Kore, 74 Language, The, 91 Late Love, 222 Later, 188 (Lemons) Pear Appears, 286 Let little Linda allow litigation, 249 Let me say (in anger) that since the day, 53 Lift up so you’re, 252 Like kid on float, 275 Like sitting in back seat, 303 Little bit patted pulled, 248 Locate I, 91 Look, 247 Looking to the sea, it is a line, 54 Loop, 246 Love, 184 Love & money & a barrel of mud, 48 Love Comes Quietly, 82 Lover, The, 58 Magellan was x’ed here, 172 Marriage, A, 66 Massachusetts, 154 Massachusetts May, 217 Matrix of world, 293 Memories, 218 men in my life were . . . ,” “The, 139 Messengers, The, 88 Method of Actuality, The, 44 Midnight, 76 Miles back, 180 Mind’s Heart, 81 Mind’s heart, it must, 81 Month one was born in, 217 Moral, 247 Morning, 175 Most explicit—, 227 Mother’s Voice, 204 Mountains in the Desert, The, 86

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Mouths Nuzz, 156 Movie Run Backward, The, 206 My children are, to me, 44 My love is a boat, 205 My love—my love says, 47 My old lady is a goof at heart, 48 My old lady says I’m it, 47 My son who is stranger, 43 My wife and I lived all alone, 67 Naughty Boy, 60 Necessity, the mother of invention, 298 Nine, 128 No one, 161 Not Again, 49 Not lost, 295 Not metaphoric, 297 Nothing “late” about the, 192 Nothing there, 243 Now and then, 248 Now I recognize, 275 Now the inevitable, 247 Nowhere before you, 161 Nubble’s Light a sort, 252 Numbers, 119 of my grandmother, 138 Of right Of wrong Of up Of down, 247 Oh (“Oh like a bird”), 210 Oh (“Oh stay awhile”), 230 Oh god, let’s go, 64 Oh like a bird, 210 Oh Love, 205 Oh Max, 211 Oh No, 65 Oh Oh, 248 Oh sadness, 192 Oh stay awhile, 230 Oh, weep for me, 296 Oh who is, 80

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Old persons swinging their canted metal detectors, 265 Old Song, 312 Old Story (“Like kid on float”), 275 Old Story (“One bell wouldn’t ring loud enough”), 319 On Earth, 318 On the path, 184 One, 119 One and, 110 One bell wouldn’t ring loud enough, 319 One Day, 160 One day after another—, 160 One more day gone, 134 One sided, 246 One’s here, 318 Opening, 190 Out Here, 181 Out window roof’s slope, 202 Outstretched innocence, 247 Particular pleasures weather measures or, 247 Parts of each person, 290 Passion’s particulars, 249 Pat’s, 250 Pat’s place, 250 Pattern, The, 93 People, 148 People don’t act, 46 People having a good time, 181 Phone, 168 Picture, A, 110 Pictures, 300 Piece, A, 110 Piece of me, curiously, 157 Place (“Faded mind”), 160 Place (“Thinking of you asleep on a”), 133 Place, The (“ . . . Swoop of hawk—”), 196

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Plague, 226 Plan Is the Body, The, 166 Please, 64 Point of hill, 224 Position is where you, 92 Pure, 242 Quicker, 105 Rain (“Things one sees through”), 155 Rain, The (“All night the sound had”), 75 Raining again. Moments ago the sky was a grey lapping pattern, 281 Reason, A, 104 Reflection reforms, each man’s a life, 297 Relative to cost, the high figures, 42 Religion, 217 Respect, they said he respected the, 52 Revelation, The, 45 Rhythm, The, 85 Road, The, 255 Sad Advice, 208 Say “eight”—, 126 Say nothing, 223 Scale’s intimate. From the frame and panes of the fresh white, 279 Scatter, 252 Season’s upon us, 249 Seemingly awash, 175 Seemingly never until one’s dead, 216 Self-Portrait, 203 Sentence, The, 50 Sentences, 250 Seven, 125 Shan’t be winding, 188 Shovel it in, 306 Sight, A, 105 Sign Board, The, 79 Sit Down, 168

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Sitting up here in, 193 Six, 124 Sleeping birds, lead me, 292 Slope of it, 244 Snow lifts it, 210 So much of my childhood seems, 313 So There, 169 Some Afternoon, 94 Some awful, 147 Some Place, 101 Something, 90 Sometimes I am embarrassed, 49 Somewhere in all the time that’s passed, 285 Song (“What’s in the body you’ve forgotten”), 223 Song, The (“It still makes sense”), 77 Sounds, 147 Stairway to Heaven, 224 Stand upright, prehensile, 293 Star, 253 Statement keep talking, 252 Steady, the evening fades, 209 Stomping with Catullus, 47 Stone, / like stillness, 82 Stuck in her stone hut, 222 Summer ’38, 252 Sunrise always first—, 253 Sun’s shadows aslant, 302 Supper, 306 Sure, / Herbert— , 135 Surf: An Elegy, The, 42 . . . Swoop of hawk—, 196 Teachings, The, 138 Temper, The, 157 Tender, semi- / articulate flickers, 162 That dim shattering character of nerves, 72 The bird, 134 The church is a business, and the rich, 55

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The emptiness up the field where, 309 The first retainer, 66 The forms wait, swan, 296 The grand time when the words, 132 The huge dog, Broderick, and, 88 The light in the morning, 159 The men in my life were, 139 the / mother (mother) unbent, 44 The mountains blue now, 86 The one damn time (7th inning), 54 The plan is the body, 166 The quieter the people are, 79 The rhyme is after, 87 The small, 189 The sun sets unevenly and the people, 45 The temper is fragile, 157 The time is, 95 The top of the mountain, 161 The truth is in a container, 299 The woman who, 222 The words will one day come, 206 Then to old Uncle Emil, 221 There (“Hard to be unaddressed—”), 253 There (“Miles back”), 180 There are words voluptuous, 184 There is a long, 158 There is / a silence, 107 There is no point, 128 There is that in love, 50 Theresa’s Friends, 187 These retroactive small, 201 They (2), 111 They are taking all my letters, and they, 56 They come now with, 121 They were trying to catch up, 111 Things one sees through, 155 Things to Do in Tokyo, 177 Think of the, 253 Thinking (“Had not”), 139

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Thinking (“I’ve thought of myself”), 236 Thinking (“The top of the mountain”), 161 Thinking of you asleep on a, 133 This distance, 300 This number for me, 122 3 in 1, 134 Three, 121 Tiger, The, 145 Time (“Of right Of wrong Of up Of down”), 247 Time (“Out window roof’s slope”), 202 Tips of celery, 111 To be in love is like going out-, 59 To consummate, 48 “To think . . . ,” 311 To think oneself again, 311 “To Work Is to Contradict Contradictions, to Do Violence to Natural Violence . . . ,” 48 Today we saw a tiger, 145 Toffee, 248 Turn as one will, the sky will always be, 295 Twisting / as forms of it, 124 Two, 120 Two by, 123 Under watery here, 294 Variation, A, 43 Wake up, 177 Wall, 218 Warning, The, 60 Way, The, 285 We are seven, echoes in, 125 We get crazy but we have fun, 48 “We’ll die . . . ,” 137 West Acton Summer, 249

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Wet/water, 304 What did it feel like, 299 What gentle echoes, 154 What I saw in his head, 63 What should the young, 58 What / singular upright flourishing, 119 What the words, 168 Whatever constitutes, 143 Whatever was else or less, 255 What’s in the body you’ve forgotten, 223 What’s memory’s, 212 What’s still here settles, 231 When he brings home a whale, 60 When he got into bed, 69 When I think, 310 When I think of where I’ve come from, 310 When the rain stops, 76 When the world has become a pestilence, 226 When they were, 120 Whenas To for, 248 Where are you—who, 130 Where / It is, 253

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Whether in the world below or above, 207 Whip, The, 61 Who is it nuzzles there, 293 Why is it pure, 242 Why not ride, 94 Wicker Basket, A, 65 Window, The, 92 Winter (“Season’s upon us”), 249 Winter (“Snow lifts it”), 210 Words (“Driving to the expected”), 25 Words (“You are always”), 103 Xmas Poem: Bolinas, 160 Yesterday I wanted to, 83 You are always, 103 You did it, 99 You have to reach, 251 You send me your poems, 57 “You will never be here . . . ,” 141 You won’t want to be early, 189 Your, 246 You’re there, 256 Zero, 130

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DESIGNER J.G. Braun TEXT 9.5/12.5 Rotis Serif DISPLAY Rotis Serif COMPOSITOR BookMatters, Berkeley PRINTER + BINDER Thomson-Shore, Inc.

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