It takes so long to finish a poem

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

Share:

a hide

There's a skin or hide between ourselves and our inner being.  And in the West that skin is very thick.  Inside us there's a sea and that sea is your inner life, your spiritual life, and your sexual impulses - everything you've gotten from the memory stores of evolution.  Then there's the outside world made of buildings and automobiles.  And these two worlds can't rub against each other.  It's too painful.  Therefore you develop a hide exactly like a cow develops a hide.  You don't want her guts to rub against the barn.

~  Robert Bly

spoken to Lewis Hyde in an interview

taken here from Robert Bly - In This World

Share:

listening to the sitar before dawn

It is not yet dawn, and the sitar is playing.

Where are the footsteps that were so clear yesterday?

Sometimes stones have no weight at all, and clouds are heavy.

To those who want me to change, I say, “I will

Never stop traveling that road which connects

Socrates to the turtle, and Falstaff to the Baal Shem.”

Every sitar note strikes a bargain with the one

Who arranges things. One note says, “A year in heaven.”

The turgid silence says, “Two years under the earth.”

The sitar players are already pulling heaven down,

While we have hardly learned to carry earth.

Perhaps they remember all their errors in loving.

Some say that Ganesha and Catherine do the work

For us all, but I see a great deal of faithfulness

In the dragon fly with her long, skinny body.

It was still dark when the fingers began to play.

Now we who have listened so hard have nothing to say.

The wavering sitar note is the early dawn.

For David Whetstone

~ Robert Bly

Share:

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 worlds 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

Share:

a home in the dark grass

In the deep fall, the body awakes,

And we find lions on the seashore—

Nothing to fear.

The wind rises, the water is born,

Spreading white tomb-clothes on a rocky shore,

Drawing us up

From the bed of the land.

We did not come to remain whole.

We came to lose our leaves like the trees,

The trees that are broken

And start again, drawing up on great roots;

Like mad poets captured by the Moors,

Men who live out

A second life.

That we should learn of poverty and rags,

That we should taste the weed of Dillinger,

And swim in the sea,

Not always walking on dry land,

And, dancing, find in the trees a saviour,

A home in the dark grass,

And nourishment in death.

~ Robert Bly

art by O'keeffe

Share:

surprised by evening

There is unknown dust that is near us 

Waves breaking on shores just over the hill 

Trees full of birds that we have never seen 

Nets drawn with dark fish.

The evening arrives; we look up and it is there 

It has come through the nets of the stars 

Through the tissues of the grass 

Walking quietly over the asylums of the waters.

The day shall never end we think:

We have hair that seemed born for the daylight;

But at last the quiet waters of the night will rise 

And our skin shall see far off as it does under water.

~ Robert Bly

Share:

Sophia in Nature - Robert Bly interviewed by Roar Bjonnes

Roar Bjonnes is editor of Prout Journal.The nature of the discourse is in poetic terms.

Bly: According to the Gnostic religion, Sophia looked down upon this planet of ours and decided to descend into it. She entered inside the stones, the trees, the birds, and the water. She went into fire and air. This is the story of Sophia.

Bjonnes: This reminds me of the Tantric concept of Shakti.

Bly: Yes, exactly. Sophia--like Shakti--is an active, powerful force, all-encompassing and all-pervading energy in nature. 

Bly: The ecology movement, then, is a response to the inability of the capitalist world to understand that Sophia is also in the rain-forest  Through the loss of the story of Sophia, the Christian Church has given permission to the capitalists to destroy nature. This was done partly by translating the word "Sophia" as "wisdom". This destroys the story and takes away the feminine quality. There have been many such errors in translating the Old Testament, and we are suffering from those mistakes today.

Share:

hearing music at dawn

It is sweet to hear music when the night

Is just retreating from the smoky branches

And the sun's enemies are throwing down their gloves.

Music is always reminding us whom we love,

One or two notes dissolve the auditor's mind

So we are swimming once more in the old river.

We are all failed farmers learning to play whist.

We have a lot of hands to play before midnight.

Someone else will have to worry about time.

I'm always glad when I hear that an old hen

Has been seen crossing the road at dusk.

It means our old teacher is still all right.

We keep remembering Barborossa's life.

A little whiskey fits in well with our lives.

The time of the Depression is not really over.

Poems like this amount to some form of music.

We dance for two hours.  When we look up,

We see that all the musicians have disappeared.

~ Robert Bly

from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey

Share:

what did we see today?

Some days we are passive, listening to the incoming waves.

On other days, we are like a light that sweeps

Out over the husky soybean fields all night.

What did we see today?  Horses at the end 

Of their tethering ropes, the wing of affection going over,

Flying bulls glimpsed passing the moon disc.

Rather than arguing about whether Giordano Bruno

Was right or not, it might be better to fall silent

And lose ourselves in the curved energy.

We know how many men live alone in their twenties,

And how many women are married to the wrong person,

And how many fathers and sons are strangers to each other.

It's all right if we keep forgetting the way home.

It's all right if we don't remember when we were born.

It's all right if we write the same poem over and over.

Robert, I don't know why you talk so confidently

About yourself in this way.  There are a lot of shady

Characters in this town, and you are one of them.

~ Robert Bly

from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey

Share:

supposed to be

It is hard to be as popular as we are supposed to be. 

The superego or interior judge has altered its requirements ...

For one who fails to become successful and well-loved, 

punishment is swift and thorough. 

Self-esteem receives a battering from the inside, 

everyone feels insignificant and unseen until, in desperation, 

we finally agree to go on a talk show and tell it all. 

Once that moment is over, 

and universal love has not poured over our heads 

following the program, we fall still farther.

~ Robert Bly

from The Sibling Society

Share:

... while you're alive

~ Bill Moyers

 interview with Robert Bly

Share:

a delicious disease

~ Ibn Hazm

read by Robert Bly

Share:

sight, taste, touch, hearing, stopped

~ St. John of the Cross

read by Robert Bly

Share:

opening

~ Coleman Barks and Robert Bly

with Bill Moyers

on Rumi

Share:

nothing except what he is

The Poetry Society of America has bestowed its highest honor, 

the Robert Frost Medal, to Robert Bly. 

The award is for "distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry."

people like us

There are more like us. All over the world

There are confused people, who can't remember

The name of their dog when they wake up, and people

Who love God but can't remember where

He was when they went to sleep. It's

All right. The world cleanses itself this way.

A wrong number occurs to you in the middle

Of the night, you dial it, it rings just in time

To save the house. And the second-story man

Gets the wrong address, where the insomniac lives,

And he's lonely, and they talk, and the thief

Goes back to college. Even in graduate school,

You can wander into the wrong classroom,

And hear great poems lovingly spoken 

By the wrong professor. And you find your soul,

And greatness has a defender, and even in death you're safe.

~ Robert Bly

from Morning Poems

***

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.

~ Hermann Hesse

from Trees, Reflections and Poems

Share:

watering the horse

How strange to think of giving up all ambition!

Suddenly I see with such clear eyes

The white flake of snow

That has just fallen in the horse's mane!

~ Robert Bly

Share:

taking the hands

Taking the hands of someone you love,

You see they are delicate cages . . .

Tiny birds are singing

In the secluded prairies

And in the deep valleys of the hand.

~ Robert Bly

Share:

I have daughters and I have sons

1

Who is out there at six a.m.?  The man

Throwing newspapers onto the porch,

And the roaming souls suddenly

Drawn down into their sleeping bodies.

2

Wild words of Jacob Bohme

Go on praising the human body,

But heavy words of the ascetics 

Sway in the fall gales.

3

Do I have a right to my poems?

To my jokes? To my loves?

Oh foolish man, knowing nothing -

Less than nothing - about desire.

4

I have daughters and I have sons.

When one of them lays a hand 

On my shoulder, shining fish

Turn suddenly in the deep sea.

5

At this age, I especially love dawn

On the sea, stars above the trees,

Pages in The Threefold Life,

And the pale faces of baby mice.

6

Perhaps our life is made of struts

And paper, like those early

Wright Brothers planes.  Neighbors

Run along holding the wingtips.

7

I do love Yeats's fierceness

As he jumped into a poem,

And that lovely calm in my father's

Hands, as he buttoned his coat.

~ Robert Bly

from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey

Share:

the frogs after dark

I am so much in love with mournful music

That I don't bother to look for violinists.

The aging peepers satisfy me for hours.

The ant moves on his tiny Sephardic feet.

The flute is always glad to repeat the same note.

The ocean rejoices in its dusky mansion.

Bears are often piled up close to each other.

In caves of bears, it's just one hump

After another, and there is no one to sort it out.

You and I have spent so many hours working.

We have paid dearly for the life we have.

It's all right if we do nothing tonight.

We've heard the fiddlers tuning their old fiddles,

And the singer urging the low notes to come.

We've heard her trying to keep the dawn from breaking.

There is some slowness in life that is right for us.

But we love to remember the way the soul leaps

Over and over into the lonely heavens.

~ Robert Bly

from Talking into the ear of a Donkey

Share:

a christmas poem

Christmas is a place, like Jackson Hole, where all agree

To meet once a year. It has water, and grass for horses;

All the fur traders can come in. We visited the place

As children, but we never heard the good stories.

Those stories only get told in the big tents, late

At night, when a trapper who has been caught

In his own trap, held down in icy water, talks; and a man

With a ponytail and a limp comes in from the edge of the fire.

As children we knew there was more to it—

Why some men got drunk on Christmas Eve

Wasn't explained, nor why we were so often 

Near tears nor why the stars came down so close,

Why so much was lost. Those men and women

Who had died in wars started by others,

Did they come that night? Is that why the Christmas tree

Trembled just before we opened the presents?

There was something about angels. Angels we

Have heard on high Sweetly singing o'er 

The plain. The angels were certain. But we could not

Be certain whether our family was worthy tonight.

~ Robert Bly

from Morning Poems

Share: