Robert Creeley

Sixty-two, sixty-three, I most remember As time W. C. Williams dies and we are Back from a hard two years in Guatemala Where the meager provision of being Schoolmaster for the kids of the patrones Of two coffee plantations has managed Neither a life nor money. Leslie dies in Horror of bank giving way as she and her Sister and their friends tunnel in to make A cubby. We live in an old cement brick Farmhouse already inside the city limits Of Albuquerque. Or that has all really Happened and we go to Vancouver where, Thanks to friends Warren and Ellen Tallman, I get a job teaching at the University of British Columbia. It’s all a curious dream, a rush To get out of the country before the sad Invasion of the Bay of Pigs, that bleak use Of power. One of my British colleagues Has converted the assets of himself and His wife to gold bullion and keeps the Ingots in a sturdy suitcase pushed under Their bed. I love the young, at least I Think I do, in their freshness, their attempt To find ways into Canada from the western Reaches. Otherwise the local country seems Like a faded Edwardian sitcom. A stunned Stoned woman runs one Saturday night up And down the floors of the Hydro Electric Building on Pender with the RCMP in hot Pursuit where otherwise we stood in long Patient lines, extending often several blocks Up the street. We were waiting to get our Hands stamped and to be given a 12 pack Of Molson’s. I think, I dream, I write the Final few chapters of The Island, the despairs Gathering at the end. I read Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing In America but am too uptight To enjoy his quiet, bright wit. Then that Summer there is the great Vancouver Poetry Festival, Allen comes back from India, Olson From Gloucester, beloved Robert Duncan From Stinson Beach. Denise reads “Hypocrite Women” to the Burnaby ladies and Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Margaret Avison are there Too along with a veritable host of the young. Then it’s autumn again. I’ve quit my job And we head back to Albuquerque And I teach again at the university, and Sometime just about then I must have Seen myself as others see or saw me, Even like in a mirror, but could not quite Accept either their reassuring friendship Or their equally locating anger. Selfish, Empty, I kept at it. Thirty-eight years later I seem to myself still much the same, Even if I am happier, I think, and older.

I wanted so ably to reassure you, I wanted the man you took to be me, to comfort you, and got up, and went to the window, pushed back, as you asked me to, the curtain, to see the outline of the trees in the night outside. The light, love, the light we felt then, greyly, was it, that came in, on us, not merely my hands or yours, or a wetness so comfortable, but in the dark then as you slept, the grey figure came so close and leaned over, between us, as you slept, restless, and my own face had to see it, and be seen by it, the man it was, your grey lost tired bewildered brother, unused, untaken— hated by love, and dead, but not dead, for an instant, saw me, myself the intruder, as he was not. I tried to say, it is all right, she is happy, you are no longer needed. I said, he is dead, and he went as you shifted and woke, at first afraid, then knew by my own knowing what had happened— and the light then of the sun coming for another morning in the world.

Position is where you put it, where it is, did you, for example, that large tank there, silvered, with the white church along- side, 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 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.

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— 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.

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.

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.

Tonight, nothing is long enough— time isn’t. Were there a fire, it would burn now. Were there a heaven, I would have gone long ago. I think that light is the final image. But time reoccurs, love—and an echo. A time passes love in the dark.

My lady fair with soft arms, what can I say to you—words, words as if all worlds were there.

The galloping collection of boards are the house which I afforded one evening to walk into just as the night came down. Dark inside, the candle lit of its own free will, the attic groaned then, the stairs led me up into the air. From outside, it must have seemed a wonder that it was the inside he as me saw in the dark there.

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