Robert Creeley

The man sits in a timelessness with the horse under him in time to a movement of legs and hooves upon a timeless sand. Distance comes in from the foreground present in the picture as time he reads outward from and comes from that beginning. A wind blows in and out and all about the man as the horse ran and runs to come in time. A house is burning in the sand. A man and horse are burning. The wind is burning. They are running to arrive.

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 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 semi- lust of intentional indifference. Be wet with a decent happiness.

Bless something small but infinite and quiet. There are senses make an object in their simple feeling for one. Originally appeared in the February 1966 issue of Poetry magazine.

My embarrassment at his nakedness, at the pool’s edge, and my wife, with his, standing, watching— this was a freedom not given me who am more naked, less contained by my own white flesh and the ability to take quietly what comes to me. The sense of myself separate, grew a white mirror in the quiet water he breaks with his hands and feet, kicking, pulls up to land on the edge by the feet of these women who must know that for each man is a speech describes him, makes the day grow white and sure, a quietness of water in the mind, lets hang, descriptive as a risk, something for which he cannot find a means or time.

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 had not thought that some- thing had such undone. It was an idea of mine.

One day after another— Perfect. They all fit.

I cannot move backward or forward. I am caught in the time as measure. What we think of we think of— of no other reason we think than just to think— each for himself.

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.

Locate I love you

inside my head Inside my head a common room, a common place, a common tune, a common wealth, a common doom inside my head. I close my eyes. The horses run. Vast are the skies, and blue my passing thoughts’ surprise inside my head. What is this space here found to be, what is this place if only me? Inside my head, whose face? the tools First there, it proves to be still here. Distant as seen, it comes then to be near. I found it here and there unclear. What if my hand had only been extension of an outside reaching in to work with common means to change me then? All things are matter, yet these seem caught in the impatience of a dream, locked in the awkwardness they mean. the swan Peculiar that swan should mean a sound? I’d thought of gods and power, and wounds. But here in the curious quiet this one has settled down. All day the barking dogs were kept at bay. Better than dogs, a single swan, they say, will keep all such malignant force away and so preserve a calm, make pond a swelling lake— sound through the silent grove a shattering spate of resonances, jarring the mind awake. the rose Into one’s self come in again, here as if ever now to once again begin with beauty’s old, old problem never-ending— Go, lovely rose ... So was that story told in some extraordinary place then,once upon a time so old it seems an echo now as it again unfolds. I point to me to look out at the world. I see the white, white petals of this rose unfold. I know such beauty in the world grows cold. the skull “Come closer. Now there is nothing left either inside or out to gainsay death,” the skull that keeps its secrets saith. The ways one went, the forms that were empty as wind and yet they stirred the heart to its passion, all is passed over. Lighten the load. Close the eyes. Let the mind loosen, the body die, the bird fly off to the opening sky. the star Such space it comes again to be, a room of such vast possibility, a depth so great, a way so free. Life and its person, thinking to find a company wherewith to keep the time a peaceful passage, a constant rhyme, stumble perforce, must lose their way, know that they go too far to stay stars in the sky, children at play.