Robert Bly: The Horse of Desire

"Yesterday I saw a face
That gave off light."
I wrote that the first time

I saw you; now the lines

Written that morning

Are twenty years old.

What is it that

We see and don't see?

When a horse swings

His head, how easily

His shoulders follow.

When the right thing happens,

The whole body knows.

The road covered with stones

Turns to a soft river

Moving among reeds.

I love you in those reeds,

Amd in the bass

Quickening there.

My love is in the demons

Gobbling the waters,

My desire in their swollen

Foreheads poking

Earthward out of the trees.

The bear between my legs

Has one eye only,

Which he offers

To God to see with.

The two beings below with no

Eyes at all love you

With the slow persistent

Intensity of the blind.

Robert Bly: 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 that they share in common.
They have made a promise to love that body.
Age may come, parting may come, death will come.
A man and a 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: The Moon

After writing poems all day,
I go off to see the moon in the pines.

Far in the woods I sit down against a pine.

The moon has her porches turned to face the light,

But the deep part of her house is in darkness.

Robert Bly: After Working

I

 
After many strange thoughts,

Thoughts of distant harbors, and new life,

I came in and found the moonlight lying on the floor.

II

Outside it covers the trees like pure sound,

The sound of tower bells, or of water moving down the ice.

The sound of the deaf hearing through the bones of their heads.

III

We know the road; as the moonlight

Lifts everything, so in a night like this

The road goes on ahead, it is all clear.

Robert Bly: Three Kinds of Pleasures

I

Sometimes, riding in a car, in Wisconsin
Or Illinois, you notice those dark telephone poles
One by one lift themselves out of the fence line
And slowly leap on the gray sky —
And past them, the snowy fields.

II

The darkness drifts down like snow on the picked cornfields
In Wisconsin: and on these black trees
Scattered, one by one,
Through the winter fields —
We see stiff weeds and brownish stubble,
And white snow left now only in the wheeltracks of the
combine.

III

It is a pleasure, also, to be driving
Toward Chicago, near dark,
And see the lights in the barns.
The bare trees more dignified than ever,
Like a fierce man on his deathbed,
And the ditches along the road half full of a private snow.

Robert Bly: After a Freind's Death

It must be summer. Push the dock out,
Bring the canoe down, find your old
Books—bird books, Hawthorne. Drive
To Gooseberry. Even in the Swedish islands,

Summer comes. They pull the linen off chairs,
Bring out the blue dishes, write some poems.
Say again: “It must be summer.”
Even though people die, it must be summer.

For Orrin

Robert Bly: The Teapot

That morning I heard water being pured 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: Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter

It is a cold and snowy night. The main street is deserted.
The only things moving are swirls of snow.
As I lift the mailbox door, I feel its cold iron.
There is a privacy I love in this snowy night.
Driving around, I will waste more time.

Robert Bly: On the Oregon Coast

(For William Stafford)

The waves come - the large fourth wave
Looming up, thinking, crashing down - all
Roll in so prominently that I become small
And write this in a cramped script, hard to read.

Well, all this fury, prominent or not
Is also hard to read, and the ducks don't help,
Settling down in furry water, shaking
Themselves, and then forgetting it within a minute.

Remembering the fury, it is up to us, even
Though we feel small compared to the loose
Ocean, to keep sailing and not land,
And figure out what to say to our children.

Robert Bly: 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: Things to Think

Think in ways you've never thought before.
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you've ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he's carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you've never seen.

When someone knocks on the door,
Think that he's about
To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven,
Or that it's not necessary to work all the time,
Or that it's been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

Robert Bly: Clothespins

I’d like to have spent my life making
Clothespins. Nothing would be harmed,
Except some pines, probably on land
I owned and would replant. I’d see
My work on clotheslines near some lake,
Up north on a day in October,
Perhaps twelve clothespins, the wood
Still fresh, and a light wind blowing.

Robert Bly: 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