it takes so long

My hand remembers stroking a sleek bird years ago, 

one which was crouching under my fingers, 

longing for the sky roof on top of the cabin roof, 

the forgiveness high in the air.  

As for me, I have given so many hours to the ecstasy of detail, 

the shadow of the closing door, 

the final syllable of that poem which is already gone, 

looking back over its shoulder.  

Well, well... sometimes in our slow hours a child climbs down into this world.

~ Robert Bly

from Reaching Out to the World -
 New & Selected Prose Poems

the third body

A man and a woman sit near each other, and they do not long

at this moment to be older, or younger, nor born

in any other nation, or time, or place.

They are content to be where they are, talking or not talking.

Their breaths together feed someone whom we do not know.

The man sees the way his fingers move;

he sees her hands close around a book she hands to him.

They obey a third body they have in common.

They have made a promise to love that body.

Age may come, parting may come, death will come.

A man and woman sit near each other;

as they breathe they feed someone we do not know, 

someone we know of, whom we have never seen.

~ Robert Bly

art by  Ismail Shammout

looking at some flowers

Light is around the petals, and behind them:

Some petals are living on the other side of the light,

Like sunlight drifting onto the carpet

Where the casket stands, not knowing which world it is in.

And fuzzy leaves, hair growing from some animal

Buried in the green trenches of the plant. 

Or the ground this house is on,

Only free of the sea for five or six thousand years.

~ Robert Bly

from The Light Around the Body

 Shasta Daisy photographed under ultraviolet light

warning

.

Sometimes farm granaries become especially beautiful when all the oats
 or wheat are gone, and wind has swept the rough floor clean. 
Standing inside, we see around us, coming in through the cracks 
between shrunken wall boards, bands or strips of sunlight. 
So in a poem about imprisonment, one sees a little light.

But how many birds have died trapped in these granaries. The bird,
 seeing the bands of light, flutters up the walls and falls back again and again. 
The way out is where the rats enter and leave; but the rat’s hole is low to the floor. 
Writers, be careful then by showing the sunlight on the walls not to promise 
the anxious and panicky blackbirds a way out!

I say to the reader, beware. Readers who love poems of light 
may sit hunched in the corner with nothing in their gizzards for four days,
 light failing, the eyes glazed. . . . They may end as a mound of feathers 
and a skull on the open boardwood floor . . .

~ Robert Bly

from What have I ever lost by dying? 

the greek ships

When the water holes go, and the fish flop about

In the mud, they can moisten each other faintly,

But it's best if they lose themselves in the river.

You know how many Greek ships went down

With their cargoes of wine.  If we can't get

To port, perhaps it's best to head for the bottom.

I've heard that the mourning dove never says

What she means.  Those of us who make up poems

Have agreed not to say what the pain is.

Eliot wrote his poems for years standing under

A bare light-bulb.  He knew he was a murderer,

And he accepted his punishment at birth.

The sitar player is searching: now in the back yard,

Now in the old dishes left behind on the table,

Now for the suffering on the underside of a leaf.

Go ahead, throw your good name into the water.

All those who have ruined their lives for love

Are calling to us from a hundred sunken ships.

~ Robert Bly

from My Sentence was a Thousand Years of Joy

finding the father

My friend, this body offers to carry us for nothing - as the ocean carries logs.

So on some days the body wails with its great energy;

it smashes up the boulders,

lifting small crabs, that flow around the sides.

Someone knocks on the door.

We do not have time to dress.

He wants us to go with him through the blowing and rainy streets,

to the dark house.

We will go there, the body says,

and there find the father whom we have never met,

who wandered out in a snowstorm the night we were born,

and who then lost his memory,

and has lived since longing for his child,

whom he saw only once...

while he worked as a shoemaker,

as a cattle herder in Australia,

as a restaurant cook who painted at night.

When you light the lamp you will see him.

he sits there behind the door....

the eyebrows so heavy,

the forehead so light....

lonely in his whole body,

waiting for you.

~ Robert Bly

from Reaching Out to the World

the teapot

.

That morning I heard water being poured into a teapot.

The sound was an ordinary, daily, cluffy sound.

but all at once, I knew you loved me.

An unheard-of-thing, love audible in water falling.

~ Robert Bly

from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey

the roof nail

A hundred boats are still looking for shore.

There is more in my hopes than I imagined.

The tiny roof nail lies on the ground, aching for the roof.

Some little bone in our foot is longing for heaven.

~ Robert Bly

from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey

art by picasso

loafing with friends at Ojo Caliente

Mineral pools remember a lot about history.

Here we are at Ojo Caliente, sitting together.

Soaking up the rumble of earth’s forgetfulness.

Why should we worry if Anna Karenina ends badly?

The world is reborn each time a mouse

Puts her foot down on the dusty barn floor.

Sometimes ohs and ahs bring us joy.  When

You place your life inside the vowels, the music

Opens the doors to a hundred closed nights.

People say that even in the highest heaven

If you managed to keep your ears open

You would hear angels weeping night and day.

The culture of the Etruscans has disappeared.

So many things are over. A thousand hopes

F. Scott Fitzgerald had for himself are gone.

No one is as lucky as those who live on the earth.

Even the Pope finds himself longing for darkness.

The sun catches on fire in the lonely heavens.

                                                                For Hanna and Martin

~ Robert Bly

from My Sentence was a Thousand Years of Joy

associative leaps in poetry

excerpts from the essay entitled

so much happens when no one is watching 

by Daniel Deardorff

There are three things involved in making a associative leap:

a place to leap from, 

a place to leap to,

and most importantly, that space which is in-between.

Bly suggests that the in-between , the liminal space of the leap, provides a mysterious kind of content.  Bly calls our attention to the many things that happen "when no one is watching."  Pointing toward that which must remain outside our conscious awareness is like Lao Tzu saying that "knowing with not-knowing is best."  Connecting "what happens when no one is watching" to the emphasis on associativity, we notice a similar invitation to consider the unconscious space behind the associative image.  There is a great distance, swiftly traversed, between the philosopher and the predator in the line: "Plato wrote by the light from sharks' teeth."

One key to entering the vast spaces in Bly's thought in understanding is something I've called "associative alacrity" - the adroit capacity to form unexpected correlations,  In the modern world this capacity has been so repressed that it's hard to work out any sense of it.   In Norse mythology there is an ash tree that connects many worlds.  This "World Tree," called Yggdrasil, presents a complex image that works like this: at the top is the solar bird, the great eagle; at the bottom is the old lunar serpent.  The third thing, which connects this opposition, is something much less grand, a squirrel.  Leaping from branch to root, the acrobat squirrel carries messages between the extremities.  The furry mammal presents the limbic capacity to bridge the contradictions without reconciliation.  The squirrel is the embodiment of the leaping consciousness.

Leaping in this manner, the poems of Robert Bly refuse to turn away from Heaven, and at once, stubbornly refuse to renounce the earthly life.  "In a great ancient or modern poem, the considerable distance between the associations, the distance the spark has to leap, gives the lines their bottomless feeling, their space."  The relationships formed by these leaps are not linear - they are not stops along some rational railway, or some predictable system of linked facts - they are images or feelings related by something inexplicable and mysterious.  In this kind of association the distance, the interval or the leap, provides verticality and depth, a kind of bottomless content which functions as what Lawrence Hatab called "mythic disclosure": it does not explain things but "presents an intelligible picture of the lived world and the form of human involvement with the lived world."

In ancient times, in the "time of inspiration." the poet flew from

one world to another, "riding on dragons," as the Chinese said. 

Isaiah rode on those dragons, so did Li Po and Pindar.  They

dragged behind them long tails of dragon smoke.  Some of that 

dragon smoke still boils out of Beowulf. ...This dragon smoke 

means that a leap has taken place in the poem.

The associative paths... allow us to leap from one part of the brain

to another and lay out their contraries.  Moreover it's possible that

what we call "mythology" deals precisely with these abrupt juxtapositions...

using what Joseph Campbell called "mythological thinking," 

it moves the energy along a spectrum - either up or down. 

It can awaken the "lost music," walk on the sea, cross the 

river from instinct to spirit.

It is in the interval of the leap that "so much happens when no one is watching" and this is related to Richard Schechner's idea that certain rituals require "selective inattention."  He says: "Selective inattention allows patterns of the whole to be visible, patterns that otherwise would be burned out of the consciousness by a too intense concentration.

this essay is part of a collection in the book
Robert Bly - In This World

Driving Toward the Lac Qui Parle River

I

I am driving; it is dusk; Minnesota.

The stubble field catches the last growth of sun.

The soybeans are breathing on all sides.

Old men are sitting before their houses on car seats

In the small towns. I am happy,

The moon rising above the turkey sheds.

II

The small world of the car

Plunges through the deep fields of the night,

On the road from Willmar to Milan.

This solitude covered with iron

Moves through the fields of night

Penetrated by the noise of crickets.

III

Nearly to Milan, suddenly a small bridge,

And water kneeling in the moonlight.

In small towns the houses are built right on the ground;

The lamplight falls on all fours on the grass.

When I reach the river, the full moon covers it.

A few people are talking, low, in a boat.

~ Robert Bly

every breath taken

Every breath taken in by the man

who loves, and the woman who loves,

goes to fill the water tank

where the spirit horses drink.

~ Robert Bly

.

passing an orchard by train

Grass high under apple trees.

The bark of the trees rough and sexual 

the grass growing heavy and uneven.

We cannot bear disaster like

the rocks-

swaying nakedly

in open fields.

One slight bruise and we die!

I know no one on this train.

A man comes walking down the aisle.

I want to tell him

that I forgive him that I want him

to forgive me.

~ Robert Bly

in transition

for WCW

I wish I understood the beauty

in leaves falling. To whom

are we beautiful

as we go?

I lie in the field

still, absorbing the stars

and silently throwing off

their presence. Silently

I breathe and die

by turns.

He was ripe

and fell to the ground

from a bough

out where the wind

is free

of the branches 

~ David Ignatow (1914-1997)

from Against the Evidence: selected poems 

...

Attempting To Answer David Ignatow’s Question

I wish I understood the beauty

in leaves falling. To whom

are we beautiful

as we go?

We are beautiful to the Mother as we go.

There are mysterious roads in jade that

Old men follow,

Routes that migratory birds walk on,

The circle dances

Iron filings do,

The things we cannot say.

Salmon find their way to old beds;

Sleeping bodies are not alone.

~ Robert Bly 

 from Holes That Crickets Have Eaten in Blankets

photo by Eliot Porter

a poem for Giambattist Vico written by the Pacific

A rephrasing of Vico;

All cultures go through three stages, Culture moves from the

Sacred World to the Aristocratic Realm to the Democratic Place,

and back again.

1.

We were sitting there, badly blessed, and brooding

On aristocracies near the trouserless ocean.

We knew we were pure prose; the ocean stretched

Out, blown by wind, but we remained where we were.

The sand shifted; all of us walked on flat boards.

We were no one in particular, in our messy lives.

We tended to stay who we were. Our minds stay in this

Particular room with Nils and Judy and Tom.

If death is the mother of fashion, we don't mind.

I am myself; I am what is around me.

Pine cones fall and stick where they fall.

That is what it's like when we are born

Not from wind or spirit, but from things. 

2.

Spirit moves where it moves; that is what 

People are like who are born of the Spirit. 

For in high air there burns a furious spirit.

It rises out of ground like Milton's mind

That meets all furies high above the sea.

It wants to rise. "If music be the food of love,

Play on." So notes, inspired not by our toes

But by th'inspired intellect, take us

Out of the dark soul-house, upward through turns

And spiral stairs, fighting the darken'd air.

The Spirit carries us, and in our minds

We know if we are high or not. It is 

Something like this for those still in the Spirit.

3.

 The wind blows where it likes: that is what

Everyone is like who is born from the wind.

Oh now it's getting serious. We want to be those

Born from the wind that blows along the plains

And over the sea where no one has a home.

And that Upsetting Rabbi, didn't he say;

"Take nothing with you, no blanket, no bread.

When evening comes, sleep wherever you are.

And it the owners say no, shake out the dust

From your sandals; leave the dust on their doorstep."

Don't hope for what will never come. Give up hope,

Dear friends, the joists of life are laid on the winds.

~ Robert Bly

from Morning Poems

 

one source of bad information

There's a boy in you about three

Years old who hasn't learned a thing for thirty

Thousand years.  Sometimes it's a girl.

This child had to make up its mind

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

"Stay home.  Avoid elevators.  Eat only elk."

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

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

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

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

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

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

~ Robert Bly

from Morning Poems


 

dance of the cells

.

My friend, this body is made of bone and excited protozoa 
and it is with my body that I love the fields. 
How do I know what I feel but what the body tells me?
 Erasmus thinking in the snow, translators of Virgil 
who burn up the whole room, the man in furs reading the Arabic
 astrologer falls off his three-legged stool in astonishment, 
this is the body, so beautifully carved inside, 
with the curves of the inner ear, 
and the husk so rough,
 knuckle-brown.

As we walk, we enter the fields of other bodies, 
and every smell we take in the communities of protozoa see,
 and a being inside leaps up toward it, as a horse rears at the starting gate. 
When we come near each other, we are drawn down into 
the sweetest pools of slowly circling smells . . . slowly circling energies . . . 
The protozoa know there are odors the shape of oranges,
 of tornadoes, of octopuses . . .

The sunlight lay itself down before every protozoa, 

the night opens itself out behind it, 

and inside its own energy it lives!

So the space between two people diminishes,
 it grows less and less, no one to weep, they merge at last. 
The sound that pours from the fingertips awakens 
clouds of cells far inside the body, and beings unknown to us
 start out in a pilgrimage to their Saviour, to their holy place.
 Their holy place is a small black stone, that they remember
 from Protozoic times, when it was rolled away from a door . . . 
and it was after that they found their friends, who helped them
 to digest the hard grains of this world . . . 

The cloud of cells awakens, intensifies, swarms . . .
 the beings dance inside beams of sunlight so thin we cannot see them . . . 
to them each ray is a vast palace, with thousands of rooms. 
From the dance of the cells praise sentences rise to the voice
 of the man praying and singing alone in his room. 
He lets his arms climb above his head, and says,
 “Now do you still say cannot choose the road?”

~ Robert Bly
(for Lewis Thomas, and his The Lives of the Cell)

taken here from The News of the Universe:
 Poems of Twofold Consciousness 
photo: red amoeba

why we don't die

In late September many voices

Tell you you will die.

That leaf says it.  That coolness.

All of them are right.

Our many souls - what

Can they do about it?

Nothing.  They're already

Part of the invisible.

Our souls have been

Longing to go home

Anyway.  "It's late," they say.

"Lock the door, let's go."

The body doesn't agree.  It says,

"We buried a little iron

Ball under that tree.

Let's go get it."

~ Robert Bly

from Morning Poems

stealing sugar from the castle

We are poor students who stay after school to study joy.

We are like those birds in the India mountains.

I am a widow whose child is her only joy.

The only thing I hold in my ant-like head

Is the builder's plan of the castle of sugar.

Just to steal one grain of sugar is a joy!

Like a bird, we fly out of darkness into the hall,

Which is lit with singing, then fly out again.

Being shut out of the warm hall is also a joy.

I am a laggard, a loafer, and an idiot. But I love

To read about those who caught one glimpse

Of the Face, and died twenty years later in joy.

I don't mind your saying I will die soon.

Even in the sound of the word soon, I hear

The word you which begins every sentence of joy.

"You're a thief!" the judge said. "Let's see

Your hands!" I showed my callused hands in court.

My sentence was a thousand years of joy.

~ Robert Bly

the hermit

Early in the morning the hermit wakes, hearing

The roots of the fir tree stir beneath his floor.

Someone is there.  That strength buried

In earth carries up the summer world.  When

A man loves a woman, he nourishes her.

Dancers strew the lawn with the light of their feet.

When a woman loves the earth, she nourishes it.

Earth nourishes what no one can see.

~ Robert Bly

from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey

another beam of light

So many blessings have been given to us

During the first distribution of light, that we are

Admired in a thousand galaxies for our grief. 

Don't expect us to appreciate creation or to

Avoid mistakes. Each of us is a latecomer

To the earth, picking up wood for the fire. 

Every night another beam of light slips out

From the oyster's closed eye. So don't give up hope

that the door of mercy may still be open. 

Seth and Shem, tell me, are you still grieving

Over the spark of light that descended with no

Defender near into the Egypt of Mary's womb? 

It's hard to grasp how much generosity

Is involved in letting us go on breathing,

When we contribute nothing valuable but our grief. 

Each of us deserves to be forgiven, if only for

Our persistence in keeping our small boat afloat

When so many have gone down in the storm.

~ Robert Bly

from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey

art by Klimt