Insight Editions · No. 202
Collected Poems
Robert Bly
This collection gathers Robert Bly’s poetry from 1962 to 2011, moving through nature, political conflict, psychological shadow, fatherhood, love, and spiritual reflection.
A study guide to Collected Poems by Robert Bly. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book in Brief
The argument in brief
- Silence first (1962). Silence in the Snowy Fields makes solitude a chosen privacy: car at dusk, barn light, lake moon, telephone poles leaping on gray sky. The crow and the starved part of the self appear as images before they become ideas.
- Two worlds and the war (1967). The Light Around the Body takes Jacob Boehme's split between outer and inner worlds and aims it at executives, Kennedy on Cuba, Johnson's cabinet, and body counts. Grief becomes the inner language that keeps rage from curdling into hatred.
- Shadow as myth (1973). Sleepers Joining Hands fuses privacy with indictment: Chinese tomb guardians, The Teeth Mother Naked at Last, and the long sleepers sequence of the sent-away brother, the warner, the night sea-journey, and the joyful chorus.
- Looking and the body (1973 to 1979). Jumping Out of Bed cools the heat with Taoist doing nothing; The Morning Glory and Camphor and Gopherwood use the prose poem to look until seal, starfish, and lover's body show their independence; This Tree returns to the farm and to one place held for a thousand years.
- Father and couple (1981 to 1985). The Man in the Black Coat Turns reckons with fathers, sons, and the grief of men; Loving a Woman in Two Worlds names the third body a couple feeds without seeing.
- Appetite and the dying father (1994). Meditations on the Insatiable Soul sits with Jacob Bly in hospital, names the culture's greedy soul, and blesses the dragon St. George is killing.
- Practice and ghazal (1997 to 2005). Morning Poems writes daily from pitchfork and dog; The Night Abraham Called to the Stars and My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy adopt a six-stanza ghazal with returning end words, binding Persian and Sufi teachers to Midwestern mud.
- Plain late speech (2011). Talking into the Ear of a Donkey keeps screen-door words, family miniatures, and the closing line that what the old poets failed to say will never be said.
Figure. Fourteen books as nine stations; the dashed line marks the turn from looking outward to the father and the couple.
Collected Poems (Robert Bly)
Bly's books arrive as stations, not chapters of one continuous argument. Early Minnesota snow and barn light teach attention without ideology. Mid-sixties work turns that attention on executives, presidents, and napalm, with Jacob Boehme epigraphs splitting outer and inner worlds. By Sleepers Joining Hands, the private shadow and the national death-wish braid into long associative poems. Later books (covered in later batches) soften into morning poems, animal affinities, and late ghazal forms without canceling the early wound.
Later books (Jumping Out of Bed onward) continue the arc.
SILENCE IN THE SNOWY FIELDS
Collection framing. Minnesota and Wisconsin fields, dusk drives, lake moonlight, barn windows through bare trees. The speaker is often alone in a car or shack, noticing rather than arguing. Politics are nearly absent; interior weather is the subject. Motifs that later feed Human Shadow and Iron John appear as images before they become doctrine: crow over ark mud, a man writing to a starved part of himself, darkness that was always under the grass.
| Subsection (spine file) | Signature poems | Dominant weather |
|---|---|---|
| Eleven Poems of Solitude | Three Kinds of Pleasures; Driving Toward the Lac Qui Parle River; Thinking of Wallace Stevens | Snow, dusk drives, Stevensian snow-speech |
| Awakening | Where We Must Look for Help; A Man Writes to a Part of Himself; Depression | Unrest, crow, self-exile, mailbox privacy |
| Silence on the Roads | After Drinking All Night; Snowfall in the Afternoon; Silence | Drift, dark under snow, sloth of the body |
Three stations inside the 1962 book as the OPF spine preserves them.
Eleven Poems of Solitude
Three Kinds of Pleasures
Three short panels of Midwestern noticing. Telephone poles "slowly leap on the gray sky" past snowy fields; darkness drifts on picked cornfields and combine tracks; barn lights toward Chicago, bare trees "like a fierce man on his deathbed," ditches half full of "private snow." What it does: trains the reader in deep-image attention before any thesis. The pleasures are seeing, not possessing.
Return to Solitude / Waking from Sleep
Return wants the "sea of solitary corridors," grief explosions, diving into death like the wheeling Bear, then finds friends changed and trees with new leaves. Waking invents the body-as-harbor: navies in the veins, seagulls in salty blood, tiny kitchen dances, master gone for the day. Motif link: waking as animal joy without Jungian vocabulary yet.
Hunting Pheasants in a Cornfield
A willow alone in dry corn holds the speaker; mind has "shed leaves alone for years"; happiness in an "ancient place" as if he were a young animal turning home at dusk. Solitude as rootedness, not pathology.
Surprised by Evening / Thinking of Wallace Stevens on the First Snowy Day in December
Evening arrives through "nets of the stars" and "asylums of the waters"; skin will see underwater. The Stevens poem pairs new snow with virgins in gold clothes, old snow with French concierges, new strength with darkness of death and a frail skiff, closing on Stevens singing of "feathers and white snow" in the boat nearing death. Already Bly uses Stevens as snow-language tutor; decades later the same poet becomes the cautionary case in Human Shadow.
Sunset at a Lake / Fall / Approaching Winter
Prose-poem calm at a pine bank; pheasant-season dusk and farmer looking at a sky that reminds him of death; September corn "wandering in dark corridors," fallen ears under snow "like jewels of a murdered Gothic prince." Death and harvest share one weather.
Driving Toward the Lac Qui Parle River
Signature drive poem. Dusk Minnesota, soybeans breathing, old men on car seats, moon over turkey sheds; the car as "solitude covered with iron" through cricket noise; then water "kneeling in the moonlight," lamplight "on all fours in the grass," people talking low in a boat. Key turn: solitude is metal-sheathed motion that still arrives at communal low speech on water.
Poem in Three Parts
Morning forever-feeling in "joyful flesh"; dream of castles and hot coals survived; box-elder leaves call us to disappear into the wilds and "live forever, like the dust." Proto-wild joy without the Wild Man name.
Awakening
Unrest / Awakening
National "strange unrest," Morgan's seas, high-school explosion that partly kills the child; baboon on shores of death; Charlemagne riding through snowy trees with stiff hands; stiff-faced men falling on knees in "dungeons of sleep." Then chestnut blossoms mingle with pain, Minnesota farmhouse barely strong enough for the storm, bodies giving off darkness. Early hint that personal sleep and national ruin share one darkness.
Poem Against the Rich / Poem Against the British
Tear inside the stone; rich man in red hat cannot hear weeping in "pueblos of the lily" or shacks of the corn; darkened armies and orisons of stones. Anti-British piece continues the historical bitterness in compressed images. Politics enter as image-charge, not pamphlet.
Where We Must Look for Help
rewrites the flood myth. Dove fails; swallows commute; help is the dark bird that finds mud. This is the seed image of
Problems in the Arkin
Human Shadow: bright culture sends the wrong bird.
Remembering in Oslo the Old Picture of the Magna Carta
Girl in housedress equals fat king under oak; garbagemen equal crows; "One thing is also another thing"; doomed galleons still sailing in tree blossoms; speaker still shocking grain; great-grandfather stepping on his ship. Deep-image simultaneity: present labor and medieval charter occupy one glance.
Summer, 1960, Minnesota / Driving Through Ohio / Funeral and Ferry poems
Beanfields and "confusion of swallows" inside; falling into Congo mouths and mill wheat. Ohio drive, Great-Aunt Mary's funeral, Chesapeake ferry: travel poems that keep Midwestern gravity while the map widens.
A Man Writes to a Part of Himself
invents the long-bag drama before the essay. City husband laughs with appointments; cave-self starves in rain. Motif link to shadow: the split is named as marital betrayal of an inner figure.
Depression / Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter
Body as clogged grain elevator, blackened wheat, dishonest life; dream of Tibetans with thin wires and work gloves; wish to rest in "black earth of silence." Then the famous short poem: cold snowy night, deserted main street, cold iron mailbox, "privacy I love," promise to "waste more time." Depression seeks earth-silence; the mailbox poem finds loveable privacy without cure-rhetoric.
Short lyrics cluster (Getting Up Early through In a Train)
Late spring, love poem, "Taking the Hands," afternoon sleep, medieval music images, solitude in woods, watering the horse, train glance. Keep as mood-board: tenderness and brief joy inside the same solitude system.
Silence on the Roads
After Working / The Clear Air of October / Laziness and Silence
Moonlight as pure sound; road clear ahead. October: gold wings without birds, wells of cold water without walls, horse of darkness riding east with a thin coatless man, sun as executioner walking into a cellar, gold animals with "robbers' eyes." Laziness: Saturday football season, dream of moles with golden wings, dust floating, fish nosing cold springs "like a spirit moving in a body." Solitude becomes luxurious animal imagination.
September Night with an Old Horse / Night
Moonlit cornfield ride; Arabian horses in tents near gold and tombs; joy at a sleepless horse on moonlight grass "as if I had thought / Of a pirate ship plowing through dark flowers"; butterfly carrying loam; living as water beetle "soon to be swallowed / Suddenly from beneath." Death under joy, already.
After Drinking All Night with a Friend, We Go Out in a Boat at Dawn to See Who Can Write the Best Poem
Title-poem of the spine file. Dark boat over spring-fed water; childhood dream of "true Gift" under pale Minnesota lakes; hands, shoes, ink drifting; close: "A few friendships, a few dawns, a few glimpses of grass… No longer caring if we drift or go straight." Argument: poetic contest dissolves into shared drift; craft yields to friendship and cold water.
Old Boards / Late at Night During a Visit of Friends / Silence
Boards and friend-sleep; speaker alone awake, human face shining as it speaks of what oppresses the living. Silence: fall clear as chickens' eyes; muffled oarlocks and unchristened shores; "sloth of the man inside the body"; homeless looking on long roads (lost dog, small duck, box-elder bug).
Snowfall in the Afternoon
Four-part close of the book. Grass half-covered; handfuls of darkness "that was always there, which we never noticed"; barn moves nearer in storm; barn full of corn moving toward us "Like a hulk blown toward us in a storm at sea; / All the sailors on deck have been blind for many years." Darkness under ordinary grass; collective blindness on the grain-ship: the image waits for the political books to name who steered.
THE LIGHT AROUND THE BODY
Collection framing. Epigraph from Jacob Boehme: outward man in this world, inward man in the inward world; two languages. Outer poems indict merchants, cabinets, television, Vietnam. Inner poems praise grief, dark grass, moving inward, a body not yet born. The "light around the body" of the title appears as aura of a not-yet-born body in "Looking into a Face."
| Part (spine) | Focus | Signature charges |
|---|---|---|
| I · Two Worlds / Romans | Executives vs inner world | Ants on Johnson's cabinet; Drusia; thorn in the ear |
| II · Poverty and Cruelty | Presidents, MacDougal Street | Kennedy lie; Three Presidents; Great Society |
| III · Vietnam War | Body counts, marches, Hanoi | Small-boned bodies; Hatred of Men with Black Hair |
| IV · Praise of Grief | Melancholia as road | Home in dark grass; Fire of Despair |
| V · Body Not Yet Born | Inward / surreal | Max Ernst; Evolution from the Fish; Dumb Speak |
Five-part architecture of the 1967 book.
I · The Two Worlds (Romans Angry about the Inner World)
The Two Worlds (epigraph)
Boehme's split is the book's operating system. Poems will speak both languages; readers must hear both.
The Executive's Death / The Busy Man Speaks / Johnson's Cabinet Watched by Ants
Merchants multiply "more than the stars of heaven"; half the population as long grasshoppers; crane handler and taxi driver die while an executive floats high. Busy man voice as self-justifying outer speech. Ants watch Johnson's cabinet: surreal miniature judgment on Great Society power. Television and smothering poems extend the same charge: media and world as suffocation.
A Dream of Suffocation / Romans Angry about the Inner World
Suffocation dream: wild dogs tear noses and eyes; body tears off its own arms; detective draws fifty-five million into a revolver; soul filaments separate; Nebraska house exploding. Then the title poem: executives know nothing of "a leaping of the body"; Romans torture Drusia for having seen "our mother / In the other world"; snow covers the mangled body; executives withdraw astonished.
allegorizes persecution of inwardness. Motif link: "mother in the other world" anticipates Teeth Mother and the feminine underworld of
Sleepers. CRITICAL note: Roman torture tableau is mythic shorthand for modern managerial numbness, not a history lesson.
II · The Various Arts of Poverty and Cruelty
Come with Me / Those Being Eaten by America
Invitation into the underside. "The cry of those being eaten by America"; Jefferson's hope in new oats; wild houses with hair between toes; "That is why these poems are so sad"; light in children's faces fading at six or seven; "The world will soon break up into small colonies of the saved." Apocalyptic tenderness, not policy memo.
Written in Dejection near Rome / Listening to President Kennedy Lie about the Cuban Invasion
European dejection sets up the short, bitter Kennedy poem: another darkness in fences of the body, moles, telephone wires, frail ankles of horses; "Darkness of dying grass"; "brutality in high places, / Of lying reporters"; "bitter fatigue, adult and sad." Turn: the lie is continuous with grass-death and buttonhole-death; political falsehood is ecological and bodily.
The Great Society / Suddenly Turning Away / Three Presidents
Dentists water lawns in the rain; murdered kings in movie-theater lightbulbs; coffins of the poor hibernating in new tires; President dreams of invading Cuba; mayor with head in hands while dark children play at Coney Island. Three Presidents gives voice-masks: Jackson wants to be a white horse; Roosevelt wants to be a stone that leaps into water with the robber; Kennedy wants to be mountain water that "will fall forever, / Missing the earth entirely." Power as failed metamorphosis.
Hearing Men Shout at Night on MacDougal Street / The Current Administration / Andrew Jackson's Speech / Sleet Storm on the Merritt Parkway
Street shout, administration satire, Jackson speech fragment, New England sleet: the poverty-and-cruelty arts close in American night noise and highway weather. Keep as atmosphere of public lying meeting private fatigue.
III · The Vietnam War
After the Industrial Revolution, All Things Happen at Once
Time collapses: Hessian Christmas still going, Whiskey Boys gathering, Henry Cabot Lodge and Ford and Wilson speaking past each other ("History is bunk!"; misattributed GM line), dead of Cripple Creek and Coxey's army singing from trees. Argument: industrial modernity stacks all American violence into one simultaneous carnival.
Asian Peace Offers Rejected without Publication / War and Silence / Counting Small-Boned Bodies
Diplomacy ignored; war and silence as twin states. Then the signature anti-body-count lyric:
Irony as moral X-ray: bureaucratic scale-lust exposed by shrinking the dead to jewelry.
As the Asian War Begins / At a March against the Vietnam War
March dated Washington, November 27, 1965. Feet moving gaily, almost separate from bodies; boat with machine guns just beyond eye-edge; Puritan darkness among pine boughs going out to kill turkeys; "We long to abase ourselves"; "We make war / Like a man anointing himself." War as liturgical self-anointing: the death-wish Bly will mythologize in Teeth Mother is already here as Puritan cup of darkness.
Hatred of Men with Black Hair / Driving through Minnesota during the Hanoi Bombings
Voices praising Tshombe and Portuguese in Angola; "men who skinned Little Crow"; "We distrust every person on earth with black hair"; State Department as exhausted crustaceans; under Pentagon cement "a drop of Indian blood preserved in snow." Then the Minnesota drive: green lakes, white turkeys, torture with telephone generator, "I felt sorry for him, / And blew his head off with a shotgun"; gaiety ending as Black Starfighters in the cup; "We were the ones we intended to bomb!" Motif link: national bag of Indian-killing projects onto Asia; private Minnesota pleasure is not innocent.
IV · In Praise of Grief
Melancholia / Turning Away from Lies
Storm light, black dog, road to dark barn; coffin wreath slipping; cathedral of starving men with bells still ringing; wound on the trunk where a branch was torn, wind swelling from it. Then the two-worlds theology restated in bullet form: Christ did not come to redeem sins as usually sold; "The two worlds are both in this world"; no one in business can be a Christian (Bly's hyperbole); thieves crying in wild asparagus. Grief clears lies.
A Home in Dark Grass
Anti-wholeness as spiritual program. Links forward to shadow-eating and Iron John wound: breakage is the curriculum.
Looking at New-Fallen Snow from a Train / In Danger from the Outer World / The Fire of Despair Has Been Our Saviour / Looking at Some Flowers
Snow from a train; outer-world danger; then the title-adjacent long lyric of Part IV: autumn, holy trees, Middle Ages iron ringing, Ice Age despair that grew "horny scales," road now lost "like a ship sinking," "Not finding the road, we are slowly pulled down." Despair once forged armor; present despair is roadlessness. Flowers close the part as fragile attention still possible.
V · A Body Not Yet Born
Looking into a Face / Hurrying Away from the Earth / The Hermit
Conversation opens "surfs of the body"; wandering in a face through dark fires; rising to "a body / Not yet born, / Existing like a light around the body." Title image delivered. Hermit and hurrying poems pull away from earth-business toward inward pressure.
Max Ernst and the Tortoise's Beak
Surreal four-panel: floating in turtle blood; tunnels of tortoise claws with moon chunks for light; waking in the tortoise's beak carried over New Jersey between constellations; dawn still transparent, falling "like a room / Full of moonlight through the air." Art-historical dream as escape hatch from Part III's realism.
Moving Inward at Last / Riderless Horses / Evolution from the Fish
Dying bull on the mountain; inside the mountain, untouched, antlers and herbs; smoke until mountains become sea. Evolution poem: grandson of fishes with "a hundred thousand small black stones"; nephew of snails with a smiling woman; moving toward "the animal with furry head"; fire up through soles of the feet; "Do / Not hold my hands down!" Proto-wild-man energy without the Grimm name.
Wanting to Experience All Things / Opening an Oyster / When the Dumb Speak
Appetite for experience; oyster opening as inward theater; close of the book:
Images of grief, seawater graves, wasted life, fallen house, broken gold sticks: only after ruin do the mute speak. Fits the shadow thesis: exile precedes speech from the bag.
SLEEPERS JOINING HANDS
Collection framing. Short winter privacy lyrics open into confessional tomb-guardian work (buried father and mother, ambition, lizard-shark retreat). Political surrealism returns in "Condition of the Working Classes: 1970." Then Teeth Mother stages Vietnam as American death-longing and ends with the Teeth Mother "naked at last" opposite luminous ecstatic men in another ocean. Part II's long poem walks the shadow going away, the warning man, the cooking-pot night journey, water drawn into the head, and the Extra Joyful Chorus.
| Block | Form | Gist |
|---|---|---|
| Six Winter Privacy Poems | Six short lyrics | Shack, Bach, black-mud solitude, someone else with coffee |
| Chinese Tomb Guardians / Shack / Norway / Conversation | Mid-length confession | Buried parents; less than half risen; brushed tracks with the tail |
| Condition of the Working Classes: 1970 | Surreal national address | F-4s, Sioux in Treasury rain troughs, Locke, blinded nation |
| The Teeth Mother Naked at Last | Long antiwar myth | Napalm; death-longing; Protestant in the fire; Teeth Mother |
| Sleepers Joining Hands (sequence) | Five titled movements + chorus | Shadow exile; fathers dying; whale / cooking pot; curved energy; hands joined |
Arc inside the 1973 book: from coffee-with-another to Teeth Mother to sleepers' hands.
I · Privacy Poems to Teeth Mother
Six Winter Privacy Poems
Four a.m. flakes, teapot emptied in snow, "shoots of joy in the new cold." Two-room shack, one room used; flying into his own poem as into a wet snowing field. "More of the fathers are dying each day. / It is time for the sons." Bach's Cello Concerto holds someone "not well-described" by Jesus, Jehovah, or Lord of Hosts. "Solitude like black mud" and joy from body, soul, or "a third place." Wake to new snow: alone, yet someone else drinking coffee, looking out. Third-place joy and the coffee companion are early names for the inward other that shadow work will formalize.
The Turtle / Chinese Tomb Guardians / Shack Poem / In a Mountain Cabin in Norway / A Conversation / Tao Te Ching Running
Turtle as slow wisdom animal. Chinese Tomb Guardians is the confession core of Part I before Teeth Mother: love for the "book of my confessions" where swallowed matter rises; madness from the wells; something still imprisoned in winter straw or under water "guarded by women"; "I am less than half risen"; tracks brushed over "with my tail"; faces of father and mother pushed into shallow waters; living as lizard or winged shark darting out to wound. Motif link: this is the long bag in narrative form. Shack, Norway cabin, conversation, Tao running: privacy continuing as practice space.
Condition of the Working Classes: 1970
Title echoes Engels; content is American surreal indictment. United States "frightened by dreams of Guatemala," houses with eight-mile wings to imprison Cubans, bread of sunken buffalo bones, water darkened by "the shadow of Negroes," longing to return to the shell. Chicago cobblestones flying; sons lost in immense forest; businessmen climbing into F-4s, launch "as Locke said it would"; "Our spirit is inside the baseball rising into the light"; eyes of the nation go blind; building explodes; Sioux dead sleep in Treasury rain troughs; women hearing cry of small animals in their furs drive into trees. What it does: stacks genocide memory, Locke, carrier war, and private female despair into one blind-nation collage.
Calling to the Badger / Pilgrim Fish Heads
Transitional animal and pilgrim images before the long war poem; keep as bridge: calling the dark animal, fish-head pilgrimage.
The Teeth Mother Naked at Last
Long antiwar poem in numbered movements. Opens with carrier engines, wings with eight hundred rivets, chickens feeling fear in beak-pits, Buddha with Padmasambhava, death-bee, Super Sabres as "knots of neurotic energy," "Hamilton's triumph," "advantage of a centralized bank," B-52s from Guam, Tolstoy's hopes asleep in the ant heap. Past-tunnels of school; staff sergeant from North Carolina dying with an empty place made when parents came home drunk; napalm; children explode; "Don't cry at that" compared to Canadian wind and reeds.
- Death-longing thesis: "These lies mean we have a longing to die." Wish for someone to lead us where pharaohs and mothers and disappeared grade-school children sleep. "Do not be angry at the President: / He is longing to take in his hands the locks of death-hair."
- GNP and tears: radio chatter of a bombing run interleaved; "This is what it's like to have a gross national product"; Super Sabre screams down "because we have so few women sobbing in back rooms" and so few tears on our own hands.
- Black silo inside the body; soot that has children and goes mad.
- Child on fire test: if a burned child came near, you would howl, tear shirt, drive over your own child's wagon, ram head like a bull; speaker would drop on all fours, vocal cords blue, two days before playing with his own children again.
- Close: want to sleep in sun on snow; refuse certain grief lectures; nation whirls; end of Republic; mad beast with European hair; two oceans: luminous globes with "hairy and ecstatic men" versus "the Teeth Mother, naked at last"; drive cars up light beams to the stars, then return crouched in the sweat drop from the chin of "the Protestant tied in the fire."
II · Sleepers Joining Hands (the long poem)
The Shadow Goes Away
Opens the sequence. Woman chained to shore; fear of cells going dark; blood-colored moon; owl landing claws out. Dream of working fields; showing the father a coat stained with goat's blood (Joseph motif). "The shadow goes away, / we are left alone in the father's house." Speaker sent the brother away in a schoolyard to "dark people"; brother learns long hair, naked drinking from hands, trailing bent grass with Sioux. Men bound his shadow in high school, tied it to a tree. Alone "asleep in the Law"; swam ashore leaving brother on the ship; wept on 66th Street. Depression hairs through the palm; nights when everything is torn. Shadow exile is staged as brother-betrayal and high-school binding: personal myth that the later essays will abstract into the bag.
Meeting the Man Who Warns Me
Wake in woods far from the castle; Louisiana train; woman urging honesty; fragments of the mother in low places. Dream meeting a man from a milder planet; "I know Christ is from your planet!"; the man touches the speaker's cock and he falls asleep (shock-initiation image). Dream that fathers are dying: Jehovah, Jesus's father, hired man in oat straw, Samson with hollow hair. Dead as conductors of underground electricity. Something white calls: darkness seen outside the cradle. Shadow underneath. What it does: kills the sky-father layer so another energy can speak; erotic-spiritual jolt as threshold.
The Night Journey in the Cooking Pot
"I was born during the night sea-journey." Love of whale, drifting men, furry wood-gatherers, snow, privacy; alone floating in the cooking pot on the sea. Crow nests high; mice in new snow; old man prayers; deer antlers abandoned. Solitude as water; road first felt in New York reading Rilke "in the womanless loneliness"; "inwardness, inwardness, inwardness"; wings trailing in corridor sand; face shining inside the mountain; animals in a glad ring; winter privacy ahead. The cooking pot is Jonah plus alchemy: containment that cooks the self toward inward path. Motif link to Iron John: pond, privacy, animal ring, mentor-call before the name "Wild Man" sticks.
Water Drawn Up into the Head
Prose inset: man goes to a far country for inheritance and returns. Feminine creature at edge of town with rifles around. Passivity and divinity; beacon over soybean fields. Visible elements known, but the great tomb is not God; spirits with sparks are not God; Christ who raised the dead "is not God, and is not called God" in this poem's apophatic run. Fish in caked mud moisten each other; better they lose themselves in a river; better lose yourself in "the curved energy" than argue Christ's deity. Entered that energy: lived alone, knelt weeping in churches, became stranger to his father. Nameless you who makes grass grow and feeds young ravens. Two hours alone become two years; "another being living inside me looking out of my eyes." King in traffic: "I shall give to you more pain than wounds at sea." Gladness in fall; tree goes naked "leaving only the other one."
Sleepers sequence as proto-shadow curriculum 1. Notice the shadow was bound and the brother sent away. 2. Meet the warner; let old fathers die. 3. Accept night sea-journey / cooking-pot solitude (inwardness). 4. Prefer curved energy to doctrinal dispute; host the other being in the eyes. 5. End in chorus: love and fight the Mother; become many animals; join hands with all sleepers.
An Extra Joyful Chorus for Those Who Have Read This Far
Late-night fighting thoughts, not floating. Marsh mother calls chicks: "I love the Mother. / I am an enemy of the Mother, give me my sword. / I leap into her mouth full of seaweed." Cascade of I-am transformations: stratosphere splinter, frightened beast, fireball from wolf's stomach, sun over Witch's house, horse singing in chestnut, man locked in oakwomb waiting for lightning, steelhead returning to mountain mother. Reading his own poems: "naked thing alone in the universe, / the hairy body padding in the fields at dusk." Crocodile, baboon, midnight flax-light, angel breaking over Urals, "I am no one at all." Second wave: thorn, unmet one, swift fish, salmon in temple pool, "what remains of the beloved," insect hugging insanity's curve, "eternal happiness fighting in the long reeds." Close of book and of this Insight batch:
refuses single identity; enacts multiplicity as joy after Teeth Mother's horror. The hairy body padding at dusk is Wild Man before Grimm clothing. Joined hands answer the bound shadow and the sent-away brother.
Extra Joyful Chorus ends in panther-dark and sleepers' hands. Same book holds both: death-wish exposed, then solidarity of the inward community.
JUMPING OUT OF BED
Collection framing. After Teeth Mother's fire, this book practices non-grasping: walnut orchards where the serious man does nothing; chrysanthemums for Tao Yuan Ming; "Every day I did not spend in solitude was wasted." Chinese dialogue poems and Minnesota privacy sit side by side. The Mother returns as beloved, not only as Teeth.
| Piece | Role |
|---|---|
| Part04a (Tao / "Old Testament, restored") | Epigraph pair: prize Mother's breasts; naked return |
| Doing-nothing / privacy cluster | New moon lives; November privacy; oyster on forest road |
| Wang Wei / P'ei Ti dialogues | Walnut orchards; Hua-Tzu; Luan creek; Magnolia grove |
| Jumping Out of Bed / The Poem | Resonating chamber; human madness thickening the wood |
| Looking at Cloud Banks | Affectionate troll-head mist that does not cling |
Soft landing after Sleepers: solitude as practice, not only grief.
Part04a · Door fragment
Two restored sayings open the book. From the Tao Te Ching vein: men work around him; he is stubborn and takes no part; "I prize the breasts of the Mother." From an "Old Testament, restored": naked from the Mother, naked return; "The Mother gave, and the Mother takes away, / I love the Mother." Same love/enemy Mother energy as the Extra Joyful Chorus, now as book motto rather than battlefield.
Doing nothing and privacy
Turtle Climbing from a Rock / Thinking of "The Autumn Fields"
Shiny turtle as if Buddha's body; snail as angel-flight; turtle eggs inland on the old sea floor. Autumn fields: table over a valley, giving from the plate to birds and grass; fish adore deep water; second-half-of-life accepts poverty and illness; pinecones and honeycomb; stocking feet toward faint incense. Chinese restraint as Midwestern practice.
Like the New Moon I Will Live My Life
Privacy beginning over; beauty in what no one rushes toward: sweetclover, culvert ends, falling corncribs, "what lives like the new moon," wind on cows' rumps, telephone wires over water, drowning sailor at mother's bed, grandfathers and grandsons. Argument: value the unloved ordinary.
Some November Privacy Poems / On a Moonlit Road in the North Woods
Crack in dry ground; boulders with snow dusting; mist and trees that may have consciousness; feminine hooves of a horse. Then oyster breathing on his own shore on a forest road; thoughts as rivulets; oyster thinking of meeting her again. Solitude eroticized without city noise.
Wang Wei / P'ei Ti cluster (Walnut Tree Orchards; Hill of Hua-Tzu; Creek by the Luan House; Magnolia Grove)
Answer-poem form: serious man not an "important person," did nothing like walnut trees; friend answers that doing nothing is joy and Chuang Tzu ecstasy. Hua-Tzu: confusion and inner suffering climbing; dew and blue mountain on clothes. Creek: heron alarmed; ducks longing to be near people. Magnolia: emerald flashes; "Joy of solitude, will you ever come to an end?" Bly practices Chinese friendship-poetry as Western solitude manual.
Chrysanthemums / After Long Busyness / Some Images for Death / A Night in December / Sleeping Faces
Moonlit ride, body alive like a plant, white chrysanthemums by the study door. After desk weeks: no light, imagined galloping horse, "Every day I did not spend in solitude was wasted." Death as shadow-tree, swinging lamp, mammoths feeling wind in hollow legs. December night: children lost, feminine connection, men who "need this fear," "men will die for this night." Sleeping faces: first fall rain washes "sly distance"; "I have decided to blame no one for my life"; child's face in storm; life as "a car racing through the rain."
Tongues Whirling / Doing Nothing poems / Walking in the Ditch Grass
Erotic cosmology: tongues as seagulls and jellyfish, turtles with wings, tumbleweeds. Sea slug alone eighteen thousand years; transparent after barefoot shack afternoon. Ditch grass: shoes like whales eating darkness; "So much of women / in this uneven grass."
Jumping Out of Bed / The Poem / Looking at Cloud Banks below the Plane Window
Title poem: approaching the resonating chamber, poem throwing itself around, snow and grass for hundreds of miles; leap from "Sadducean pillow," crinkly gold hair; moon over drunk's hut; teaspoon in car trunk. Companion "The Poem": fierce intent nature does not know, dense human madness thickening wood like a violin. Plane window close: cloud banks as troll-heads, forgetfulness, childhood stories; affectionate creatures with backs turned, "Willing to dissipate in the wind." Turn: after Teeth Mother's clinging death-wish, clouds model non-clinging affection.
THE MORNING GLORY
Collection framing. Part05a states the program: disasters come from pulling everything into the self; the pine is complete without us; Basho: "The morning glory: / another thing / that will never be my friend." Section I scatters animal, art, hockey, and reading poems. Section II is the Point Reyes sequence (California coast with children). Section III widens to Benton, Norway, Christmas Eve, barn door.
| Section | Signature | Practice |
|---|---|---|
| Part05a preface | Basho morning glory | Let things alone; second joy |
| I (Lobsters file) | Dead wren; Creeley as crow; hockey; locked-in animals | Prose looking |
| II Point Reyes | Mount Vision; Dead Seal; Large Starfish | Coast + child + oil death |
| III (Barn file) | Benton visit; Christmas Eve; Opening the Barn | Domestic / sacred / animal lamps |
Morning Glory method map.
Part05a · Preface fragment
Occult saying: to see the invisible, penetrate more deeply into the visible. Taoist and "curving lines" thought: disasters from letting nothing live for itself, longing to pull friends into ourselves. First sense that a pine is complete without us: alienation and depression. Second sense: joy. Basho's morning glory as emblem of non-friendship that frees.
I · Prose looking (Lobsters file)
A Bird's Nest Made of White Reed Fiber / Leonardo's Secret / Looking at a Dead Wren in My Hand
Nest as Crimean ward hair, forgotten like lives before rebirth "ecstatic and black." Leonardo's Virgin and St. Anne: smile like cow's side or wet stubble; jagged rocks as "old brains of the sea" glowing while a shore hut man drinks saltwater. Dead wren: forgive radios and unsaid thanks; ricelike legs as music bars in empty church; "feminine tail, where no worms of Empire have ever slept"; mourning-cap black spot; rabbi sorrow image. Intimate looking as moral apology.
Sitting on Rocks / Fish Hatchery / Octopus / Hollow Tree / Tide Pool
Shaw Cove rocks; Wyoming hatchery; octopus intelligence; hollow tree; tide pool miniatures. Keep as training sets for the later seal and starfish: patient description before myth.
Seeing Creeley for the First Time
Creeley as crow: insecure boy laugh, shining black "crow hair," beak, bad-eye sideways look, short hollow harsh speech versus owl vowels and wolf howls; crows care for children, wary, "almost happy" in twos and threes. Portrait as species-recognition; links to Bly's crow of help without naming ark mud.
The Hockey Poem (four parts)
For Bill Duffy. Goalie, Attack, Fight, Goalie again: sport as ritual violence and grace in prose blocks. American public energy watched with the same eye as animals.
Walking Sussex / Turtle / Frost / Daughter's Gift / Tumbleweed / Voznesensky / Cherry Tree
Coast and frost; three-year-old's gift; dry tumbleweed from snow. Voznesensky reading: wood-animal face, Italian cowboy shoes, Neanderthal arm swing, voice as waterfall and prairie whirlwind; "mother-quality on fire"; shout of the deep-throated woman about pet chicken and doll bureau. Cherry tree night. Poet-watching as gender-voice theater.
Two Prose Poems on Locked-in Animals
Bored Elephants: gray heads swaying; sea with no islands; mouthless fish-shaped animals swerving angrily.
captivity as spiritual weather. Motif link to shadow bag: energy rocking with nowhere to go.
Waterfall / Isleta Mission / Poem about Tennessee / Black Crab Demon / Rock Islet
Southwest and Pacific closes of Part I. Black Crab Demon: speaker becomes the sideways crab, unmarried, no parents, "alone inside myself; I love whatever is like me," hurrying through "womb-systems"; dream of a stranger disappointed in him; heavy chest, life unchanged. Proto-shadow: identification with the demon animal and the unchanged life.
II · The Point Reyes Poems
November Day at McClure's Beach / Welcoming a Child in the Limantour Dunes
Alone on jagged rock; sea more private; seaweed flags; black ducks who never weep for their sins; "It is not our life we need to weep for. Inside us there is some secret." Child-to-be among sand grains that love what lives without force; salmon sensing Oregon waters; child floating in "Pacific of the womb." Coast as initiation shore for fatherhood.
Trespassing on the Pierce Ranch / Climbing Up Mount Vision with My Little Boy
Ranch trespass as edge-walking. Mount Vision: whole way he holds the father's finger, "small leafy hand"; banana slug loneliness; fairy tale of boy changed to hollow log for refusing the witch his hair; wise woman (child corrects "wise man") and crow who takes pearl then mosses the witch's chimney and drops an oyster on her head; land on top "bare, forbidding, so unlike a little boy's mind"; child's favorite part: a friend wetting her pants while hiding. Father-son climb braids fairy-tale crow (help bird again) with comic bodily truth: vision mountain and pants pee in one walk.
Excursion on Tomales Bay / Calm Morning at Drake's Bay / Salamander / Seawater Pouring Back
Bay and ridge poems: salamander find; water over stones. Keep as Point Reyes weather continuing the looking practice.
The Dead Seal near McClure's Beach
Two-day prose elegy. Day 1: brown log, still alive, oil that heats houses "so efficiently"; unfinished-arm flipper; cries Awaark; lunges; looks like old lady who lost her hair; waits for the speaker to go. Day 2: farther up shore, thinner, ribs showing; "Goodbye, brother, die in the sound of the waves. Forgive us if we have killed you. Long live your race, your inner-tube race." Swim in "pure death" while assassinations break above. Argument: oil modernity and tenderness share one beach; brotherhood with the dying animal without rescue fantasy.
The Large Starfish
Nineteen-arm purple starfish in tide pool; glacier pace; tubes like "a man looking for a woman"; put back, unfolds, "as if nothing had happened, and nothing has." Ecstasy of low tide kneeling alone: the morning-glory ethic enacted.
III · Returns (Barn file)
Helicopter Riverside to L.A. / Porcupine in the Wind / Visiting Thomas Hart Benton and His Wife in Kansas City
Transit and animal weather; long Benton visit: American painter household as living museum of energy and marriage (dense scene-work; keep as art-world kinship parallel to Voznesensky). Hardangervidda walk: Norway stone plateau continuing Jumping Out of Bed's cold solitude.
Rendezvous at an Abandoned Farm / Caterpillar / Morning by the Lake / August Rain / Grass from Two Years
Abandoned farm meeting; insect and lake mornings; August rain; two-year grass. Domestic Midwestern eye after California coast.
Christmas Eve Service at Midnight at St. Michael's
For Father Richter. Brother killed six months before; weeping at the tree; angel at St. Michael's; Christmas pine as green winter/summer being with thirty golden planets; snow's "Manichean labors"; priest places infant Christ in cradle; wafer break as "clear and terrifying sound," "permanent"; confusion: "we want to take our bodies with us when we die"; large man flying over water with wound on chest. Grief liturgy after the seal's pure death.
Opening the Door of a Barn I Thought Was Empty on New Year's Eve
White snow fields; empty-looking barn full of life; dog terrified then curious; steers' instinct reservoir; enemies asleep; they ask only crushed corn, hay with dust, "sometimes to feel an affection run down along the heavy nerves." Book closes on animal lamps, not Teeth Mother fire.
THIS BODY IS MADE OF CAMPHOR AND GOPHERWOOD
Collection framing. After Morning Glory's outer looking, Camphor turns to inner biology and kinship: Erasmus in snow, Lewis Thomas cells, father never met, ewes, owlets, orchard keeper. Camphor and gopherwood (biblical building/perfume woods) name the body as fragrant constructed vessel. Less Vietnam; more farm, bed, and cellular pilgrimage.
| Cluster | Poems | Charge |
|---|---|---|
| Threshold | Walking Swiftly; A Day Alone; The Sleeper | Artist energy; dream music unplayed |
| Father / animals | Finding the Father; Owlets; Ewes; Galloping Horses | Lost father; night farm |
| Title core | Lover's Body as Protozoa; Coming in for Supper | Cells merge; children's play |
| Resistance / praise | Wheel Does Not Move; Wings Folding; Cry over Pastures | Blocked sperm/soul; cucumber body; naming joy |
From cellular love to named cry over pastures.
Part06a · Dedication fragment
Gendron dedicates the book to "All the waters of this world." Minimal spine leftover; treat as blessing over the body's fluids and the farm's weather that follow.
Threshold and father
Walking Swiftly / A Day Alone / The Sleeper
Energy pools and knots into will, generosity, "mad love that lasts forever"; artist carves oceanic waves into the dragon's mane. Day alone as clearing. Sleeper: visitor with dulcimer; dreamer does not wake or play; sleeping man takes a shutting door for a tooth falling or head rolling. Passivity as withdrawn inwardness (echo of cooking-pot privacy, softer).
Finding the Father
invents the lost-father quest in prose before Iron John's remote father thesis. Shoemaker, Australian cattle herder, cook who painted at night: wandering occupations. Heavy eyebrows, light forehead. Motif link: body as boat to the unmet father.
Owlets at Nightfall / Going Out to Check the Ewes / Galloping Horses / A Dream of What Is Missing / Old Man with Missing Fingers / Walking to the Next Farm
Night farm sequence: young owls; ewes; horses; missingness dream; maimed old man; walk between farms. Keep as bodily rural weather around the father poem: caretaking and injury in one parish.
Title core
The Lover's Body as a Community of Protozoa
For Lewis Thomas and The Lives of a Cell. Body of bone and excited protozoa; love of fields through the body; Erasmus in snow; Virgil translators burning the room; man in furs falling off stool at Arabic astrology: "this is the body, so beautifully carved inside… husk so rough." Entering others' magnetic fields; horse rearing at the gate; sweet pools of circling smells; sunlight before protozoa, night behind. Space between two people diminishes to merge; fingertip sound awakens cell-clouds on pilgrimage to a small black stone remembered from Protozoic times when it was rolled from a door (resurrection pebble for cells); friends who help digest hard grains; dance in an unseen sun-ray palace; praise sentences rise; arms climb: "Now do you still say you cannot choose the Road?"
Cellular mysticism replaces Teeth Mother politics: salvation as digestion friendship and chosen Road.
Coming in for Supper
Paths in snow; elbows touching children's elbows; "so much love flows out and around in circles." Children as small fires: Biddy's joke song (Yankee Doodle on a turtle); Mary's coffin inscription from Ariel song if she dies young; heron lightness; Biddy kissing grownups. Books as feather bed; encyclopedias as heavy oyster-shell-breaker dusk; inventions lost; wasps still knowing river-clay pots. Dinner invitations to "The Thwarting of Captain Alphonse" with family cast list. What it does: grounds protozoa theory in kitchen theater; love as circulating practical joke and playbill.
Camphor body curriculum 1. Body carries you like ocean logs; follow it to the unmet father. 2. Love is protozoa communities waking in two people at once. 3. Supper and children's plays are the public form of that circulation. 4. When the wheel jams (blocked desire), the plain goes bare. 5. Praise requires names; the cry over pastures completes looking.
Resistance and praise
How the Ant Takes Part / When the Wheel Does Not Move / Two Days on the Farm / The Orchard Keeper / We Love This Body
Ant in the larger work. Wheel poem: dense energy pools in abdomen and will not move; blocked sperm; cricket too free; howling in the air; soul's spears crossing; naked old man by grieving sea; house of sticks falls; sun hunches; moon refuses the sickle. Farm days and orchard keeper as counter-rhythms. "We Love This Body": explicit body-praise after blockage.
Wings Folding Up / Snowed in Again / The Cry Going Out over Pastures
Cucumbers thirsty; hose by rhubarb; "these cucumber leaves are my body"; elephant trunk in darkness; new age through dark; waterer asked how to get through the night without water. Snowed-in privacy reprise. Closing cry:
Hawk body extracts love "beyond all rules"; flute holes move under dark fingers; piercing cry over pastures only the deer visits; after nine days alone, closeness and joy; bee rising to find the sun "to become the son"; traveler through exile touching his kingdom ground again; praise to the first man who wrote the joy clearly.
THIS TREE WILL BE HERE FOR A THOUSAND YEARS
Collection framing. After Camphor's body-as-vessel, Tree re-plants the deep-image eye in stubble, granaries, and family death. Less Vietnam and Teeth Mother; more brother-grave clods, plow-turned earth, and faithfulness going by like a river. The pine's "found a place to be" is the book's ethic: rootedness without empire claims.
| Cluster | Poems | Charge |
|---|---|---|
| Part07a | Tao Yuan-Ming pine | Shadow that lasts a thousand years |
| Listening / farm | Cricket; Cornpicker; Digging Worms; Dawn in Threshing; Writing Again | Winter sound; labor dreams |
| Kin / death | For My Brother; Driving Parents Home; Women We Never See Again | Snow silence; frailty; lost loves |
| Crow / dream close | Crow's Head; Empty Place; Moses' Basket; Dream of an Afternoon; Full Moon | Fierce black among white; faithfulness |
Tree map: pine ethic into farm elegy.
Part07a · Tao Yuan-Ming epigraph
After a storm the leafy tree is no longer solid, but the pine still throws a full shadow. It has found a place to be. For a thousand years it will not give up this place. Chinese restraint as Minnesota program: not the morning glory's never-be-my-friend, but the pine's refusal to abandon ground.
Listening and farm work
Listening to a Cricket in the Wainscoting
five similes, no argument. Cricket as death-warning and old-body whisper. Motif link: black sails / black tin continue Snowy Fields crow without naming mud.
Writing Again / Dawn in Threshing Time / To Live or Not
Moral writing makes clouds boil blackly; day's end: restless people lifting small things; "what good will it do me in the grave?" Dawn: three-bottom plow in stubble; farmer puts on jacket plus "the knowledge that he is not strong enough to die," first felt in the wooden cradle at threshing. To Live or Not: live = pick up death crumbs / rush forward eating your own death like a locomotive catcher; exist = drop bread for birds. Labor metaphysics without manifesto.
Cornpicker Poem
Three movements: abandoned granaries and hubcaps; dream-fight with many-armed woman in willow crotch, jaws set, "victory"; dawn, cornpicking today. Sexual-struggle dream nested in farm machinery. Keep as Tree's night-labor twin to Camphor's blocked wheel.
Digging Worms / A Dream on the Night of First Snow
Worms from chickenhouse clods; dreams press; children balance us / we balance their graves; castle wall falls when carelessness dislodges stones that pass through the body. First snow: attic girl talking operas; salamander strides over a log "like a chessmaster," then tractor, then caravan into winter mountains with dogs and feathered lances. Grave-balance and salamander confidence: Tree's two tempos of mortality.
Kinship, death, looking
For My Brother, a Year After His Death
Last night, full moon. Snowy fields, roads silent. Clods above snow in the plowing west: "like mountaintops, or the chests of graves." Minimal elegy; Snowy Fields diction returned as brother-grieving.
Driving My Parents Home at Christmas
Parents' frailty on a mountainside edge; call over the cliff, only snow answers. Talk of hauling water, eating an orange, grandchild's photograph left behind. Door opens: they disappear. Oak falling in forest: who hears through miles of silence? They sit close "as if pressed together by the snow." Argument: filial driving as rehearsal of their vanishing; snow as the only reply and the press that holds them.
Women We Never See Again / Walking Where the Plows Have Been Turning / An Empty Place / Moses' Basket
Lost women as chestnuts in rain, moths behind books; hand in hollow tree touches "dark places between the stars"; fortress of ecstatic blue stone. Plow-turn walk for Gioia Timpanelli: Irish "music of what happens"; humming body jealous of no one; cricket hears and disregards, listening for the next sound. Empty corncob: "where each kernel had been, there was a place to live"; oyster shell doors; "palace of many mansions" Christ prepares. Moses' basket: we cherish reeds (Water Mother hair) but eyes love the basket's curve in river water. Domestic theology of emptiness and rescued child.
The Crow's Head
Solitude day ends with children; fails fifty times a day. Pre-dawn wind; snow; wind as woman's skirt or slow growl "Enoch." Crow's head found by the bridge, on the sash: feathers on Roman beak; "fierce, decisive, the one black thing among all this white." Signature crow returns as relic, not living helper: decisiveness against whiteout.
Dream of an Afternoon with a Woman I Did Not Know
Woke, not yet dawn. Rooster as sickle moon; windmill ladder to gray cloud; feed grinder growling. Frost clouds the weeds. Dream: coffee alone near fireplace and delicate cups. "I loved that afternoon, and the rest of my life." Unscored erotic/companion dream that retroactively blesses waking years. Motif: Camphor father-behind-door flipped to unknown woman-behind-cups.
An Evening When the Full Moon Rose as the Sun Set
April 11, 1976. Sun as bronze god on archaic errands, "guides his life by his dreams," then gone. Moon rises; three wild geese; pintails alert; "the life of faithfulness goes by like a river / With no one noticing it." Book's closing ethic: unnoticed fidelity under two lights.
Tree curriculum 1. Find a place; throw a full shadow; do not give it up. 2. Listen until cricket becomes widow, bell, ear-hair. 3. Drive the frail home; accept snow as the answer. 4. Keep one black fierce thing among the white. 5. Notice faithfulness: it goes by like a river.
THE MAN IN THE BLACK COAT TURNS
Collection framing. After Tree's rural rootedness, Black Coat stages the masculine shadow Bly will soon lecture: prodigal dragging, convict with radio, father's wedding 1924, fifty men in a lake-shadow. Domestic bank balance and bus waits sit beside myth. The coat-man is refusal and mystery, not a solved Jungian type.
| Part | Signature | Charge |
|---|---|---|
| I (Noah file) | Snowbanks; For My Son Noah; Prodigal; Convict; Mourning Neruda | Distance / tenderness / father chain |
| II (Emily file) | Eleven O'Clock; Dickinson Grave; Sturgeon; Bouquet; Ant Mansion | Night inventory; distance; erotic rose |
| III (Culvert file) | Grief of Men; Father's Wedding; Fifty Men; Kneeling Culvert | Male grief; limp; water-serpent |
Black Coat three-part grief map.
I · Snowbanks and son
Snowbanks North of the House
Those great sweeps of snow that stop suddenly six feet from the house: thoughts that go so far. Catalogue of stopped energies: boy reads no more books; son stops calling; mother puts down rolling pin; wife loves husband no more at a party; minister falls leaving church; father grieves by coffin, turns from wife; sea and moon alone. Toe pivots in dust.
title image as incomplete approach. Motif: distance that will not close; grief as weather that stops short of the door.
For My Son Noah, Ten Years Old
Night and day arrive; what is old remains old; lumber pile does not grow younger; barn stands; advocate of darkness not lost. Horse, chicken, primitive not shot into night. Kind man comes closer, loses rage, sits at table. Proud only of days in undivided tenderness: drawing, stapled books, coloring a man with fire in his hair; small tea carefully poured; "calm and delighted." Counter-poem to Snowbanks: closeness practiced, not refused.
The Prodigal Son / The Convict and His Radio / Mourning Pablo Neruda
Prodigal in husks; friend with steering column in chest; father beyond father; old man dragged only as far as he dragged his father; "this dragging of father and son goes on / Century after century"; father seventy-five, face as water with a door pigs have gone through. Convict: buffalo jump myth then prison exit with cardboard box, forgotten tongue, crying all night toward a black radio. Neruda elegy: practical faucet water for grasshopper-eaten willows; jar darkening the carseat; water that does not intend, mourning that does. Father-chain, prison isolation, poet-water.
II · Night inventory and Emily
Eleven O'Clock at Night
Lies alone; day's ledger: sacrifice notes he cannot relate to his life; daughter to bus for haircut; wanted mail-praise, got none; bank balance $65 against a thousand needed. "So this is how my life is passing before the grave?" Walnut brain glows; mourns consciousness he does not have. Stubborn things: walls, shoes like animals at table, stomach's curved demand. Used to escape through pumpkin pinhole as genie; now longs for what he cannot escape. Pythagoras path, microscope will, 707 wing, pistons: "for that there is no solution." Something besides will loves the woman; children unknown before they came; winter dark of late December: no solution. Argument: consciousness arrives too slowly; modernity and love both unsolvable; stay in the room.
Visiting Emily Dickinson's Grave with Robert Francis
Black iron fence ovals like wine stems / Aran chapel windows. April clear. She arrived at fifty-six carried by six Irish laborers when brother refused a carriage; coffin of violets and pine; "immense distance" between solid house and plot: Satan's rises and falls, stars, first love in dress sleeves to death of the person in that room. Quotes "Exultation is the going / Of the inland soul to sea." Family prayer as addressing an Eclipse called Father. Francis: apartment chosen so he can see her grave; dandelion wine in small glass; "For this I have abandoned all my other lives."
The Dried Sturgeon / A Bouquet of Ten Roses / Finding an Old Ant Mansion
Rock Island sturgeon: motion gone; darkness enters behind the head; pine needle holds the human night; scales "humorless as railway schedules," tapering into "sleek womanly death." Rose bouquet: robin-breast silk; Tom Thumb carpet-dark; aborigine spear eye; vaginal and phallic petal readings; center darker rose as sacrificed man under oak, girl descending, Chartres windows. Ant mansion: sixteen floors eaten in a wood chunk; workmen's-bench brown; cave-dark stalls; woman at forty reading mother's wash-day silences; ant caravans, embroidered egg chambers, pasture sighs held in sane wood. Dense object-meditations: death, sex, collective labor inside one desk relic.
III · Father grief and culvert
The Grief of Men
Buddhist New Year message he wrote himself, signed "Buddha": busyness caught you; start toward me and I will meet you; weeps. Coot's darkening call; porcupine unseen under bushes; men die on high slopes calling a sound the porcupine does not make. Bertha (father's sister) dies in childbirth against doctor's "no more children"; husband throws himself against the wall; men hold him; father sits night after night. Male grief as impact and vigil, not speech.
My Father's Wedding · 1924
Lonely for father, sees ragged barkless log near uncle's milk wagon. Men with invisible limp; sons often angry. Bhutan bird-men dancing on one bad leg, dog teeth: they do what they want. Speaker learned to walk with no limp, clear tracks, even leaped: "Guess where my defect is!" Father already had barklike skin to repel the sympathy he longed for and would not accept. Wedding words read; man in black speaks the sentence; speaker holds him "for the first time and the last." After: both alone; no friends invited; two-story house turned into a forest "where both he and I are the hunters." What it does: wedding as founding wound; black-coat official returns; hunt shared in a private forest.
Fifty Men Sitting Together
After clear-cut walk, lake-shadow: fifty men lifting something indistinct into resonating night. Reeds with thin threads of darkness, relaxed in mud. Son who lived apart from working men by forty still hopes he will not die, will not throw himself into the shadow. Dark comes like snow or herds past a cave mouth. Night on the other shore. Collective male chant as unreachable ground for the death-avoiding intellectual son.
Four Ways of Knowledge / Kneeling Down to Look into a Culvert
Dream of claw-footed woman emptying him through the navel; learning by falling into the glass mountain. Culvert close:
Culvert = children's future gaze; lake of return each time children are grown; serpent solitude torn by the next birth. Tree's thousand-year pine inverted: thousand-year aloneness ended by fighting love.
Black Coat curriculum 1. Notice where energy stops six feet from the house. 2. Practice undivided tenderness (Noah's tea and drawings). 3. Admit the dragging of fathers and sons across centuries. 4. Stay in the room at eleven o'clock; stop escaping as genie. 5. Kneel into the culvert; accept being torn when the feathery head arrives.
LOVING A WOMAN IN TWO WORLDS
Collection framing. Title echoes Boehme-ish "two worlds" already latent in Light Around the Body. After Black Coat's solitary serpent, these poems practice staying in the room with a woman: closed door, lights out, weeping without shame or honor; also ordinary affection "our bodies experienced for ten thousand years."
| Cluster | Poems | Charge |
|---|---|---|
| Ocean / third body | Out of the Rolling Ocean; Letter to Her; Rainy September; Third Body | Heat behind matter; claim/no claim; shared breath |
| Blackbird / night | Man Woman Blackbird; Night Frogs; What Frightened Us; Alone a Few Hours | Stevens epigraph; honesty; hermit love |
| Holy / May | Conversation with Holy Woman; Köln Concert; Horse of Desire; Good Silence; Hawk; Month of May | Return after years; abandon; unfinished love |
Loving a Woman map: from Whitman heat to unfinished May.
Ocean, letter, third body
"Out of the Rolling Ocean, the Crowd . . ."
Not only ant alone on carpenter's board or March turtle on boulder. Whitecaps born and die alone; pastures with a path between; branchy stalks; tires on the gas-station rack; rough-barked young cottonwood on windy shore: all dear today.
Whitman title turned Midwestern inventory; two-worlds thesis in one stanza: visible dear, heat behind.
Letter to Her / In Rainy September
Letter: loved and told her; then lied so she would love him; peaked castles ahead; hurricane carries off the snail still clinging to pine. Rainy September: forehead to seaweed sand; "I have put off choosing for years"; fern has no choice, receives earth/water/night. "I have no claim on you." "The love I have had with you is enough." Could live apart: sheldrake from flock, oak alone on hillside. Stay: door closed, lights out; "I weep with you without shame and without honor." Claimlessness and weeping as adult love ethics after Black Coat's mute men.
The Third Body
Man and woman sit near each other; do not long to be older, younger, other nation/time/place. Content, talking or not. Breaths together feed someone we do not know. Fingers; book handed. They obey a third body they share; have promised to love that body. Age, parting, death will come. Still they sit; still they feed "someone we know of, whom we have never seen."
Blackbird night and honesty
A Man and a Woman and a Blackbird
Stevens epigraph: man and woman are one; man and woman and blackbird are one. Two rivers join in cloudy chamber; alien twenties nights on interior mountains forgotten. Blackbirds walk around feet as if they share knowledge. Heron wing-tips over flooded lake: we know and don't know what the heron feels. Couple-plus-animal as Stevens practice in Minnesota weather.
What Frightened Us / Night Frogs / Alone a Few Hours
Rain into black fields; power neither knows has spoken; overnight rain on faces after innermost cave: frightens a little. Night Frogs: wake in woods far from castle; woman whispers "I am afraid that you won't be honest with me"; flat four-foot shape under the door by morning; blind spot in the car: "What is it in my father I keep not noticing?"; thinned himself like wire at ten, twenty, twenty-eight; "Is there enough left of me now to be honest?" Alone: streak of light, field-mouse trail, barn darkened by rain; shadows dear; hermit's boy: master up the mountain picking ferns; then realizes he does love. Honesty after self-thinning; love discovered in fern-errand absence.
Holy woman, music, May
Conversation with a Holy Woman Not Seen for Many Years
After so many years, walking to her. "You have come after so long?" Could not come earlier: shabby mouth's cavernous thirst ate the seeds of longing that should have been planted; awkward, baffled, dishonest, slept; dreamt of sand. Her eyes in sorrow do not laugh. "I have come after so many years." Minimal dialogue: delay as spiritual failure; return without excuse inflation.
Listening to the Köln Concert / The Horse of Desire / The Good Silence
After loving intently: Jarrett notes tumbling; ice from twigs; notes as food not eaten, comfort not taken, lies not spoken; "The music is my attention to you"; tears, face turned away. "When men and women come together, / How much they have to abandon!" Wrens' fancy threads; animals abandon money each year. Horse of Desire: "Yesterday I saw a face that gave off light" written twenty years ago; horse head swings, shoulders follow; stones become soft river among reeds; love in reeds and bass. Good Silence: Anglo-Saxon extravagance; loves in a little way, "the old way, the way of the rowboat alone in the ocean"; Welsh cliff house; storm horse; hand held working, neither speaking; "ordinary affection" of ten thousand years; bones that painted prayers and took lives. Abandon and ordinary as twin truths.
The Hawk / In the Month of May
Hawk from Catal-Huyuk; ocean births pole-oriented herring; fir needles down the Rogue; mole's mother gone into the sky: land/sea/sky mingle. May: leaves open; bees work; fish make a living the first day; monarchs high.
love addressed from the incomplete self; Gabriel fed with radishes and walnuts; unfinished as holy, not defect. Closes the three-volume arc from Tree's place-finding through Black Coat's torn serpent to love that claims the still-changing.
Two-worlds love curriculum 1. Notice heat behind matter; keep the cottonwood dear. 2. Drop claim; weep without shame or honor. 3. Feed the third body you have promised to love. 4. Ask if enough self remains to be honest. 5. Love from the unfinished; abandon what the music abandons; keep ordinary ten-thousand-year affection.
MEDITATIONS ON THE INSATIABLE SOUL
Collection framing. Part I is friend-elegy and craft (Stafford, Wright, Stevens, teachers). Part II is the father cycle. Part III names the insatiable soul and children's rage. Part IV allegorizes Notke's 1489 Stockholm sculpture and a "did not care" suite (David, Jonah, Mirabai) that redefines care as release. Less erotic third-body; more funeral home and cultural appetite.
| Part | Signature | Charge |
|---|---|---|
| I Codfish file | Thomas and the Codfish; Stafford died; Gratitude; Oregon Coast | Craft / friend death / teachers under ice |
| II Blacksmith file | Visiting My Father; Funeral Home; Blacksmith's Room | Hospital / coffin / dream rope |
| III Title file | Meditations; Anger Against Children | Greedy soul; rage at kids |
| IV St. George file | St. George sculpture; Did Not Care suite; Time Runs Backward | Bless the dragon; Samson unmakes |
Meditations four-part map.
I · Friends, craft, teachers
Men and Women / Waiting for the Stars / The Man Who Walks Toward Us
Moose cock in lily pads calms; retrieve pleasures the Fathers threw away with the Gnostics; Tristan and Isolde's bawdy lodge. Thirst for dark heavens received in the womb; Arcturus as Arabs' Keeper of Heaven; salmon slipping into ocean when the door opens. Catalogue of forgotten rock, unread poets, angers drunk at mother's breast, boys on rafts into mountains who must not be waited for. Opening key: body pleasure against father-anger; night-hunger as natal thirst.
Letter to James Wright / On the Oregon Coast / When William Stafford Died
Gossip-elegy to Wright: Ammons still writing garbage; Rexroth biographer without humor; climb inside Chinese-poem swallow holes; "By God, I'll try anything." Oregon Coast for Stafford: fourth wave makes the writer small; keep sailing, figure out what to say to children. Stafford death:
friendship as irreversible current. Motif link: Black Coat's unfinished approach vs. entering the stream.
Thomas and the Codfish's Psalm / Gratitude to Old Teachers / Thoughts in the Cabin
Gaiety of form: vowels return like evening star; three returns make a note; turtle's midnight egg-work. Frozen lake: walk on the unwalked; teachers beneath holding the ice; stillness around. Cabin: free of panic; no more fame needed; expect less; misdirection, silence, misinformation allowed. Craft as playfulness and debt to the dead underfoot.
II · Visiting the father
Visiting My Father (seven parts)
Hospital gown awry, bluish reptile neck; "Are you ready to die?" / "It's too boring around here." Doctor says not ready; four-year-old boy and inadequately feathered soul remembered. Long sequence of weather-known body, desire-engine that never phrased what it wanted: "And I am / His son." Closes with Prayer for My Father:
death as hawk-transfer; the tenderness refused in life promised by Night's Lord. Completes Camphor's unmet father and Black Coat's bark-skin wedding.
Dream of Myself at Twelve / In the Funeral Home / A Dream of the Blacksmith's Room
Hay-hiding father; mother covers for drinking; child finally breaks horse-collar, throws gun, jabs pitchfork: delayed rage-act. Funeral: oak leaves above winter face; director leaves him alone with cream-colored hands; marriage held "invisible mountains, touching / And not touching." Blacksmith dream: father safe among bolts and nails; gives ivory jar of precious fluid; later a man throws down a wizened body, rope on neck; "He didn't die / That way!"; "It's over. You / Don't have to..." Dream-corrects the death method; jar means time has come.
III · Insatiable soul
Meditations on the Insatiable Soul
Four movements. Nail-cutting, whale backs, mink tip, tongue: soul used to eating and being eaten; greedy to pray for new heavens; fire in dry wood. Greeks clean bright teeth; soul eats shellfish, Caribbean, rainforests, Amazon; "Who wants to eat the meat / Cooked in the Holocaust? Oh, you know." Worm-shouldered desirousness: grind love for talk shows; photograph every breast; hate father and son; twelve-year-olds kill twelve-year-olds; Great Lord of Desirousness. Northern lights; buffalo woman; foreskins of angels; owl husbands the moors. Personal father-grief widens into a culture-psalm of appetite: Holocaust meat, media erotic, child violence in one charge.
Anger Against Children
Vet screams child-killer taunt; parents leave kids in Oregon forests with stones and "Do your own thing" note while planes land on Maui. Civilization's gadgets and still unconscious. Rage: mother wants to reject womb-child via Senators; wife as Aztec Princess with obsidian over sleeping Oppressor husband; he dreams deer torn by female demons. Rage shouts at children, then dyes hair and loves celebrities; talk shows say only the famous live well. Waifs inside broken by Pauline gospels. What it does: children's fear as adult projection dump; celebrity culture as rage's last sofa.
IV · St. George and not-caring
St. George, the Dragon, and the Virgin
Bernt Notke, 1489, Stockholm Cathedral. Dragon on back like child lifting four feet against insane parent; girlish knight is the New Testament boy Bly was; hates the boy lifting lance above the father; each of us has been marsh dragon / Joseph / Grendel / forgotten alchemical spirit "Without whom is nothing"; muddy greatness of childhood; long work to break the horse for the solar boy; earth-handed disreputable one dying all over the world; Virgin prays on knees "as well she might."
Inversion of Teeth Mother / solar hero: bless the monster the culture-boy kills.
How David / Saint / Jonah / Mirabai Did Not Care / The Dark Egg / Time Runs Backward After Death
Not to care = love orphans; leap from misery; love sunlight on table; Mirabai washing low-born teacher's feet and drinking the water; mother gave body, father "black / Overcoat for the soul," time to love the third power / black sun under earth. Dark egg in Crow's nest; Vincentine in whale throat: suffering or not, parents good or bad, "What does it matter." Samson after death: answers go back into the lion; bitter and sweet marry; hair grows golden again; Delilah's scissors become playful swords; sinks east and is born. Death as unmaking of wound-narrative.
Insatiable Soul curriculum 1. Enter the stream if affection put you there (Stafford). 2. Meet the father in the shared young hawk. 3. Name the culture's appetite without flattering it. 4. Bless the swamp monster you were trained to lance. 5. Practice "not caring" as release into orphan-love and black sun.
MORNING POEMS
Collection framing. After Insatiable Soul's rage and dragon, Morning Poems practices lightness without denial: bad people needed; things to think; one source of bad information is the three-year-old survivalist inside. Father still appears (dead father called; calling your father from the whale library) but as morning material, not seven-part vigil.
| Part | Signature | Practice |
|---|---|---|
| I Pitchforks | Shocks; Why We Don't Die; Conversation with Soul; Bad People; Things to Think | Morning room; soul talk |
| II Dog life | Resemblance to a Dog; Dead Father Called; Family Photograph 1940 | Accept the life that wandered in |
| III Applause | Wanting More Applause; Calling Father; Yellow Dot; Easy to Give In | Envy / Jonah / Kenyon elegy |
| IV Stevens | Stevens Fourth Grade; Rethinking Stevens; Bill Stafford; Wounding Others | Voice near the moon |
| V Doubts | My Doubts; Bad Information; Face in Toyota; Eclipse | Friendship risk; inner child |
| VI Vico / Ruth | Vico by Pacific; Reading Snowy Fields; For Ruth; Mouse | Culture stages; say you |
Morning Poems practice map.
I · Pitchforks and soul talk
Early Morning in Your Room / The Shocks We Put Our Pitchforks Into / Why We Don't Die
Coffee grinder wasplike; years to arrive; finally a room; Anatomy of Melancholy and Kafka's Letter to His Father on the shelf; dance with one leg. Shocks of grain: "I've given myself away. / Take me. It's over."; each bundle like a soul tucked into the cloud of souls; after death, abundance together. Why we don't die: September voices right; souls longing to go home ("Lock the door, let's go"); body disagrees, buried a little iron ball under that tree. Morning as earned room and harvest metaphysics.
Conversation with the Soul / He Wanted to Live His Life Over / Bad People / Things to Think / Two Ways to Write Poems
Soul wants something to look at: farm too large, then field; marry again each snowfall; holy dead by the bed; field gets too small, fall in love with someone else. Shy life over: open the door, Alaska, pretend the boat is life and climb in. Bad people needed: fingernails as claws; sharks speed other fish; hard-faced men in black coats chase you to shore in dreams; Depression moves tumbleweeds across states. Things to Think: phone as vaster than Yeats; wounded bear at door; moose with unseen child on antlers; knock that says you're forgiven or if you lie down no one will die. Two ways: discover sounds toward the end, or choose rhymes first. Barn at Elabuga: war kill vs. hanging in the barn after; family unmarked yet thumb circles forefinger while reading.
II · Life as a dog
The Resemblance between Your Life and a Dog
Face deranged adjusting to a life that was not the ten-year-old's bedroom mirror river. Sparrows burst with fiery glee you can't quite get back to. What it does: anti-mastery ethic after men's-movement certainty; acceptance without self-flattery.
Waking on the Farm / Family Photograph, Sunday Morning, 1940 / What the Animals Paid / When My Dead Father Called / Visiting the Eighty-Five-Year-Old Poet
Stubble proud with frost; sun out of ground; goats butt a red Chevrolet. 1940 photo: Esther Berg's Clara Bow waves; boy (speaker) smiles, sleeve too short; men's eyes hard; grasshoppers, Marietta farm still black. Animals paid with wool, wombs, fear, squealing; women with bowed heads; men, father among them, with drinking; demons: "Pay to the last drop!" Dead father called from Bellingham streetlamp, Forties shoes, smoking; why so long to dress? "Perhaps / He left us somewhere once." Old poet among ice-floe books like Eskimo hunter; Emerson keen; apple acres, madhouse, plates against the wall.
III · Applause, father-whale, yellow dot
Wanting More Applause at a Conference / It Is So Easy to Give In / Calling Your Father
Envy at two still in the den; six teats far inside wiry fur; call it a mood when we can't remember. Give in: pine persuaded by small wind; cat drowns children because mouse needed that; General offers extra battalion to necklace-of-skulls goddess. Calling Your Father: boy leaps to sea for big Mother; whale agrees; curved library inside like British Museum; burn romance novels for smoke to get out. Jonah-library as comic father-hunger after Meditations' hospital.
The Black Figure Below the Boat / Conversation with a Monster / The Mouse / The Yellow Dot
Tiny black figure swims under the boat twenty years; island of giants: "Don't say you didn't want it. Just get ready." Monster adoption / Jonah ask. Mouse: tea to God; furry cruelty with paws; secret with ears. Yellow Dot for Jane Kenyon: God as stitchery with large tractors; open grave a tiny hole for the needle; "I / Need a yellow dot here, near the mailbox." Elegy as divine pattern-joke that does not console and somehow holds.
IV · Stevens, Stafford, wounding
Wallace Stevens in the Fourth Grade / Rethinking Wallace Stevens / Tasting Heaven / What Bill Stafford Was Like
Daydreaming on school bench, admiring a voice not yet found; voice far up near rounded moon; moon as magma, punk, dog poop: better, more like us; rogue moon can't hold God; make do with waltzes, Florida, prancing white horses. Rethinking: rash to say gods dead; if gone only Imagination replaces them: Stevens in Hartford garden like a girl in white dress. Tasting heaven: Stevens said world without heaven to follow; yet invited priest while dying; "delicacies / Are left over from some larger party." Stafford: small steps up mountains; rustling of a thousand small-winged birds feeding; eyebrow said it; nudge to the safe place for the night.
V · Doubts and bad information
My Doubts on Going to Visit a New Friend / One Source of Bad Information / The Face in the Toyota
White horse outside kitchen even in rain; will I do dishes, know Stevens by heart, not undermine? Afraid of the moment eyes fail to meet and the horse looks up. Inner three-year-old (sometimes a girl) uninformed for thirty thousand years; six big ideas, five don't work; still saved your life with "Stay home. Avoid elevators. Eat only elk." Toyota face: fall in love, overlook more, crushed, weep on mountain road; she becomes part of the world you don't see. Eclipse in Maine: camera obscura; thousands of fir-crescent suns at feet; chocolate and a joke. Clothespins as wished vocation. After a Friend's Death: "Even though people die, it must be summer."
VI · Vico, Snowy Fields again, Ruth, mouse
Reading Silence in the Snowy Fields / Words the Dreamer Spoke to My Father in Maine
Early books loved snow, fencepost, barn door, seldom you ; furtive men said you would lead to closeness that won't happen. Some mornings close ears to Shirley Temple creamers' bitter blessing; "Then I too speak this beautiful word you ." Dream machine shop with dead father; "Oh look at me / When we talk"; oil-stained floor; "We could be there if we could lift our eyes." Midcareer silence book reread as fear of you ; morning courage to say it.
A Poem for Giambattista Vico Written by the Pacific
Vico's three stages: sacred to aristocratic to democratic and back. Sitting badly blessed by trouserless ocean; pure prose; pinecones stick where they fall: born from things. Spirit-born rise like Milton's mind fighting darkened air. Wind-born: Upsetting Rabbi says take nothing, sleep where evening finds you; "Don't hope for what will never come. Give up hope, / Dear friends, the joists of life are laid on the winds." Culture theory as Pacific sermon: stay messy democratic, honor spirit-rise, accept wind-homelessness.
Looking at Aging Faces / People Like Us / For Ruth / A Conversation with a Mouse
Faces decide in the womb how much world to let in; Aunt Nettie cufflinks; hawk profile: "The world is fair, and if it's not, / I think it is." For James Wright: wrong numbers save houses; thief talks to insomniac and goes to college; wrong classroom, great poems, soul found. For Ruth: birch curve; sprig of chervil; not insisting on old pity; "this new way of letting a poem be." Mouse loves curliness; speaker likes bones lined up; mouse cites planets and Milky Way; "You're near the end / Of the century when a sleepy mouse brings in the Milky Way."
Morning Poems curriculum 1. Earn the room; put the shocks into the wagon. 2. Let the dog-life come in hungry and unimpressed. 3. Name envy and the yellow dot without dressing them as virtue. 4. Keep Stevens's moon-voice; drop gods-are-dead swagger. 5. Visit the new friend anyway; say you ; joists laid on the winds.
THE NIGHT ABRAHAM CALLED TO THE STARS
Collection framing. Title poem: we take as Lord the stars that go down; badger soul loves flying dirt; heart a calm potato by day, weeping abandoned child by night. Themes: ruin as health, mud as beauty, art as kill-and-save, friendship with unfaithful lights. Rembrandt, Ypres, Chekhov, Shabistari precursors appear before the next book's full Sufi turn.
| Part | Signature | End-charge |
|---|---|---|
| I Abraham / Bruno | Night Abraham; Wildebeest; Muddy Footprint; Monet; Horace | Setting stars; confusion; mud map |
| II Titus | Trap-Door; Walking Backward; Parrot; Titus Red Hat | Paradise moment; milk fear; father protects son |
| III Ypres | Nikos; Scholars; French Generals; Ypres 1915; Raft of Green Logs | War gaiety; poetry as slaughter craft |
| IV Baal Shem | Baal Shem and Bacon; Chekhov Cabbages; Spark's Fault; Eel | Ways of knowing; ruin-drinking |
| V Wealth / Amen | How This Wealth; Noah; Listening; So Be It Amen; Dawn | Mystery of souls; assent |
Abraham five-part ghazal map.
I · Abraham, mud, beauty's fire
The Night Abraham Called to the Stars
Abraham cries to Saturn and Dawn Star "You are my Lord!" then is destroyed when they set. "Friends, he is like us: / We take as our Lord the stars that go down." Diggers like badgers; mud beautiful to the badger soul; muddy shoes in wet fields; exiles in the serpent's kingdom; onion fields looking up.
titles the book's theology of unfaithful lights. Motif: Tree's rooted pine flipped to walking mud.
Giordano Bruno and the Muddy Footprint / The Wildebeest / Moses' Cradle / Monet's Haystacks / What Kept Horace Alive
Crane's foot in mud as life-map; farm boot's sucking sound as planet's cry; heaven inside the womb so no black hair turned from; Bruno burned for infinite worlds implied in the muddy print. Reason's House is confusion; wildebeest leaps among crocodiles; Herd Girl and Shepherd Boy get one spring night across the Milky Way. Moses' cradle porous to Nile ignorance; beauty drenched in birth blood; baby's descent gives a taste for war. Monet: love of Beauty leads to hell; house and books thrown into fire; "I have loved God!" and he had; grocery weeping under horses' hooves. Horace: moment in Paradise then barefoot in the grave; groundhog eaten; generosity of snowflakes leads to suicide.
II · Titus and walking backward
The Trap-Door / Walking Backward / Wanting to Steal Time / The Way the Parrot Learns
Moment in Paradise then trap-door to Lords of Misreason; praise saints who never mention God; poetry house splashed with blood; kiss the books. One joy, hundreds of sorrows; Abode of Smelly Bones near Whitman's retarded brother; walk backward in the messy world; milk frightens Savonarola and Aristotle. Steal time in bags from the bank at noon; poets not saints; fondness for Gogol's dead souls. Parrot learns speech from mirror-trick; if God sat behind a mirror, mercy might sound like one's own voice; name in the other world is "So Many."
Rembrandt's Portrait of Titus with a Red Hat
bright colors may lie; too many well-lit necks call for the axe; young blessed male hunted; Holy Family hiding on the way to Egypt. Completes Meditations' hawk prayer with painterly father-protection.
III · Ypres and the raft
The Battle at Ypres, 1915 / The Raft of Green Logs / In Praise of Scholars / The French Generals
Tammuz to Underworld; peat-bog man; world pulls us out backwards; every shaped iron to be paid for: "At Ypres we paid dearly for the Bentley car." Hankering for disaster; Magi misled by satellite; gaiety the morning of war is momentary. Poetry fit for slaughterers; furry herd of images saved or murdered; fierce from writing; waterfall still holding Rilke-Boehme twig of reason; "Some marriages are rafts... You could not have saved me." War and craft as twin kill-economies.
IV · Baal Shem, Chekhov, spark
The Baal Shem and Francis Bacon / The Cabbages of Chekhov / The Eel in the Cave / Why Is It the Spark's Fault?
Five Ways of Knowing too few; thrush has a thousand. Old souls hid from Adam killing rabbits; Baal Shem chosen from those who turned from the window: hence miracles; Bacon never understood that tenderness. Attraction to ruin saves; Chekhov shocks heavens with dark cabbages; Blake's chained old man measures ruin; agree life is ruin and four hours of singing suffice. Veins open to shadow; another person planned the life; eel entices soul falling from Heaven; invisible angels pull the swimmer. Spark curves toward earth when hammer hits iron: not the spark's fault; remember disaster in poems; memory feeds on ruin as cows drink river water.
V · Wealth, Amen, dawn
How This Wealth Came to Be / Noah Watching the Rain / Listening / So Be It. Amen. / Dawn
Ocean not deep enough for Melville's soul; Ark voyage not long enough for Abraham's; squirrels in a million acorns could not find Chaucer's; Sahara inches from boulders; maybe moon gave Mandela's. Abundance leads to war; twenties in father's night; mouse nibbling chocolate of sadness; Noah told to praise rainy night. Goose cry: if God doesn't listen, why are we? Remedy for deep water is listening; die like fish jerked from water. Dead dog's beautiful teeth (Jesus); leap of boy to old man: Amen; Praise God and Damn God synonyms for Amen. Dawn: if we can't find Heaven, bluejays; Adam naming at dawn; fenceposts appearing; right to love setting stars and rising ones.
Abraham ghazal curriculum 1. Love the lights that set; keep muddy shoes. 2. Half the face in shadow is enough (Titus). 3. Pay for the iron; do not romanticize war's morning gaiety. 4. Drink ruin; bless the spark that falls. 5. Say Amen to speed, weddings, and beautiful teeth on the road.
MY SENTENCE WAS A THOUSAND YEARS OF JOY
Collection framing. Title from "Stealing Sugar from the Castle": poor students of joy; one grain of sugar; "You're a thief!" / callused hands / sentence of joy. Continues Abraham's ruin-theology but tilts toward permission: growing wings on the way down; fat old couple whirling; it's all right.
| Part | Signature | Charge |
|---|---|---|
| I Ojo / sitar | Loafing; Sitar before Dawn; Greek Ships; Visiting Teacher | Mineral forgetfulness; waterfall of reason |
| II Pelicans / cry | Growing Wings; Tightening Cinch; Call and Answer; Pelicans; Samson | Iraq silence; paper boats |
| III Throaty note | Singing Same Note; Pistachio; Hiding in Drop; Motherwell | Tabla / Kaaba / black clouds |
| IV Evidence | Mailing Evidence; History of Mourning; Fat Old Couple | Affair as life; ochre bone |
| V Shabistari | Shabistari; Cities Burned; Bridegroom; Stealing Sugar | Secret garden; joy sentence |
Thousand Years of Joy map.
I · Mineral pools and sitar
Loafing with Friends at Ojo Caliente / Listening to the Sitar before Dawn / When I Am with You / The Greek Ships / Visiting the Teacher
Earth's forgetfulness in mineral pools; Anna Karenina can end badly; mouse foot on dusty barn floor reborms the world; vowels open closed nights; luckiest to live on earth. Road from Socrates to turtle, Falstaff to Baal Shem; sitar bargains year-in-heaven against years-under-earth; wavering note is early dawn. Sarod carries into not-being; father's face through fencepost wood; blessing to hear we will die; hinting at you to cross the border. Greek ships of wine: if not to port, head for the bottom; poets agreed not to say what the pain is; Eliot bare bulb murderer; throw good name into water. Teacher (Nurbakhsh): Norwegian forgetters; grief brought; "I thought you came because you liked me!"
II · Wings, cinch, Call and Answer, pelicans
Growing Wings / Tightening the Cinch / Call and Answer (August 2002)
All right if Cezanne paints the same picture; earned pain nourishes more than lottery joy; "Robert, you've climbed so many trees to reach the nests. / It's all right if you grow your wings on the way down." Horses saddled for death; shout "My heart is never bitter!"; grief a horse, speaker the missing rider; thin hold on reins. Iraq and melting ice: why no cry? Angels hard of hearing in jugs of silence from wars; Neruda, Akhmatova, Thoreau, Douglass remembered; silent as sparrows; life lasts seven days: cry before Sunday night. Rare late political ghazal: form's praise-engine aimed at war silence.
The Pelicans at White Horse Key / The Blinding of Samson / Rembrandt's Brown Ink / Flamenco
Pelicans dive; Lord paints at night in a dark room; murderer dreams four times a month: "These lines are paper boats / Set out to float on the sea of repentance." Men coming to blind Samson; mother's grief at sunset; father wrestling son destined to lose; take away those knives. Music and paint as repentance vessels after Call and Answer's shout.
III · Throaty note and drop of water
Singing the Same Throaty Note / The Pistachio Nut / Hiding in a Drop of Water / For Robert Motherwell
Weeping over nights unable to weep; farm boy off the tractor track; Dark Angels brush words from snow; women suffer between boy children; "Robert, you keep insisting on the same throaty note... old man gone mad on a ship." God crouches over one pistachio; Wind River no grander than a child's waist; Haydn mansion then last note burns the courthouse; about to become nothing like a music note. Rabia's donkey raised after she shouted at God; hiding in a drop makes the hidden face visible; Ferris Wheel stops and you still swing laughing. Motherwell's two black clouds: soul never gets enough taste of sorrow; relatives of birds that followed Jesus to Egypt.
IV · Evidence and mourning
Mailing Evidence to the Prosecutors / A History of Mourning / The Fat Old Couple Whirling Around / Losing the House in a Card Game
Affair as life story; maps of Bali under pillows; mailed evidence three times; judges clap; blind, drove horses far. Evening speckled with grief; ancestors covered dead with stones; ochre bone; bead in grave; still brooding why the sun rises. Drum: night we die will be long; fat old couple whirling is good; knock the ladder away; become a soul and disappear. Lost house at cards; fourteen in Geometry; farther into Egypt with every defeat.
V · Shabistari and the joy sentence
Shabistari and the Secret Garden / The Night the Cities Burned / The Bridegroom / Stealing Sugar from the Castle
Gnat and elephant legs close; straw marrying wind; thousand years of thought in a warm room; drive buggy over prairies of human sorrow. Daughter of Lot fleeing Enlightenment ruins; poems veer to darkness. Bridegroom longing for existence; moth to candle; hunchback outside the festival of existence.
titles the book as verdict on a life of sugar-theft from the castle: vocation as joyful punishment.
Thousand Years curriculum 1. Loaf until the mouse foot reborms the world. 2. Cry out (Call and Answer) before Sunday night. 3. Grow wings on the way down; keep the throaty note. 4. Mail the evidence; accept the judges' applause. 5. Show callused hands; serve the joy sentence.
TALKING INTO THE EAR OF A DONKEY
Collection framing. Title poem: so much to say into donkey oats-ears; donkey says never mind spring, just lift lips closer. Ethic of the book: keep talking into whatever patient ear will have you; keep the small boat afloat; let some words through the screen door be enough.
| Part | Signature | Charge |
|---|---|---|
| I Long-married | Sympathies; Small Boat; Ravens; Blind Old Man; Father and Son | Screen-door enough |
| II Daughters / Donkey | Daughters and Sons; Talking into Ear; Wanting Sumptuous Heavens | Fish-turn; donkey ear |
| III Family problem | That Problem; Keeping Quiet; Box of Chocolates | Drink; childhood war |
| IV Ramage | Ramage for Mountain; Old Gnostics; What Is Sorrow For | Alone on slopes |
| V Benedictine | Poetry Reading Atchison; Father at Forty; Mother; Teapot | Stafford; origin of walk |
| VI Old poets | What Old Poets Failed; About My Father; Smoke-Stained Fingers | Never be said |
Donkey six-part late map.
I · Long marriage and the small boat
The Sympathies of the Long-Married / Keeping Our Small Boat Afloat / Ravens Hiding in a Shoe / The Blind Old Man / Father and Son
Grains of eternity; angels on old turtles; one bird through clouds enough; sweet face at the door enough; rough music all right; worry the next-door couple; "Some words heard through the screen door are enough." Latecomers picking wood; admired in galaxies for grief; persistence keeping small boat afloat when so many gone down. Ravens in old woman's shoe; prayers refused a thousand times; write indoors again a thousand times. Blind old man who decides when we die; children mostly fond of us; curtains in afternoon. Card games do end; father sends youngest son off on the bus.
II · Daughters, sons, donkey, heavens
I Have Daughters and I Have Sons
Six a.m. paper thrower; Boehme praising the body versus ascetics in fall gales; right to poems/jokes/loves? "Oh foolish man, knowing nothing - / Less than nothing - about desire."
Dawn sea, Threefold Life, baby mice; life of struts and paper like Wright Brothers planes, neighbors holding wing-tips. Kin-touch as deep current after decades of father-hunt poems.
Talking into the Ear of a Donkey / Wanting Sumptuous Heavens / Starting a Poem
So much to say; donkey can't wait for breath in oats-ears; never mind lost April legs: "Just take hold of my mane." Oysters and lobsters content; only opposable-thumb grumblers want sumptuous heaven; heron drinks dark rum and is content. Starting a poem: word knocks, relatives steal tennis shoes; like marriage you get the madness of the family too.
III · That problem in the family
That Problem in the Family / Keeping Quiet / A Family Thing / The Box of Chocolates
Bumblers; nothing clear; why the war / why the car; got on the tractor; "Why do you drink?" only mother asked; rest wouldn't take her side. Friend: every war is childhood violence coming closer; "Something / Happened to me, and I can't tell / Anyone, so it will happen to you." Heart-shaped chocolates once a year; one life, one woman: God's rule he didn't like much. Plain family speech after ghazal cosmic: the unfinished Black Coat forest in kitchen scale.
IV · Ramage and Gnostics
A Ramage for the Mountain / For the Old Gnostics / What Is Sorrow For? / Turkish Pears / Thoreau as a Lover
Silent in moonlight; mountain enters the man alone on slopes; sits with a stone no one has seen. Fathers wrong about end of world; Gnostics right and not right; dragons copulate; untempered soul grumbles in empty light. Sorrow as storehouse of wheat and tears; feed birds of sorrow; or in the valley spread wings. Poem with her own kitchens and Turkish pears. Thoreau extravagantly alone with the lover's flower-book.
V · Benedictine room, parents, teapot
A Poetry Reading at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas
To remember William Stafford. Exercise Room; bike shifted aside; words point one direction; Lewis and Clark by the river; Amelia Earhart's gray house; moth on screen; "Listening with Sister Faith in the Exercise Room." Stafford ethic returned as coziness and possible bravery.
My Father at Forty / My Mother / The Teapot / The Hermit
Loved him: first love; way of opening a poem taken from how he walked into a field. Mother afraid of TB, death, father; sweetness bubbling; bought piano with own money; hardly a word in the home. Teapot: ordinary cluffy pour; "all at once, I knew you loved me. / An unheard-of thing, love audible in water falling." Hermit: when a woman loves the earth she nourishes it; earth nourishes what no one can see.
VI · What will never be said
About My Father / Smoke-Stained Fingers / What the Old Poets Failed to Say
Father as Mongol nomad feeding Astrakhan lambs; gift of holding the world together; hundred sorrows alive in him; "If you see Jacob, tell him I am his son." Still time for smoke-stained card fingers; Jacob tending sheep on the old farm; angels still messaging Joseph. Sunlight on wheat-heads; thank whoever kept sorrow alive; Hafez brought out of the grave; why sad titles, cattle to slaughter, wars so long.
Collected Poems' last poetic word: limit as fidelity, not despair. Completes Snowy Fields' silence with an admission that some silence is permanent.
Donkey curriculum (late style) 1. Screen-door words are enough for the long-married. 2. Let children's hands turn the deep-sea fish. 3. Name the family drink-problem without a meeting. 4. Walk the mountain alone; store sorrow as grain. 5. Accept that what old poets failed to say stays unsaid.
Note on omitted end matter
Sec 74 (Index of Titles and First Lines, ~9,040 source words) is a mechanical concordance. Sec 75 (About the Author) skipped as jacket copy outside the poetry body.
Main Points
Main Points
- Silence is a method, not a mood. Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962) trains the senses on barns, cars at dusk, lake moonlight, and snow until the ordinary opens; every later book spends that attention.
- The deep image arrives before the idea. The crow over the ark mud, the starved part of the self, and darkness under the grass appear in 1962 as pictures; they become shadow theory only decades later.
- Boehme's two worlds organise the politics. The Light Around the Body (1967) argues that outer power cannot pull the thorn of the inner world, so it turns on whoever reports that world.
- Indictment names names. Kennedy lying about Cuba, Johnson's cabinet watched by ants, body-count arithmetic, an executive floating high while the crane handler dies: the anti-war poems are specific, and that specificity is their force.
- Grief keeps rage honest. "In Praise of Grief" and "A Home in Dark Grass" treat sorrow as the inner language that stops indictment from becoming plain hatred.
- The Teeth Mother joins nation and psyche. The Teeth Mother Naked at Last (in Sleepers Joining Hands, 1973) reads napalm and policy as a disguised longing to die, and asks the reader to feel the burned child until the animal brain returns.
- The sleepers sequence is a shadow curriculum. The brother sent away, the warner, the night journey in the cooking pot, water drawn into the head, and the chorus where all sleepers join hands map the later prose of A Little Book on the Human Shadow and Iron John.
- Cooling follows heat. Jumping Out of Bed (1973) answers mythic intensity with Taoist doing nothing, Wang Wei and P'ei Ti answer poems, and clouds that do not cling.
- The prose poem is a looking instrument. The Morning Glory (1975) looks at lobsters, a dead seal, a starfish, and a barn of steers until their independence shocks twice: first as alienation, then as joy.
- The body is a community. This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood (1977) imagines the lover's body as protozoa waking in two people at once, and follows the body toward the unmet father.
- Stay in one place. This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years (1979) borrows Tao Yuan-Ming's pine: throw a full shadow and keep your ground; cricket, cornpicker, and parents driven home at Christmas carry the farm elegy.
- Father grief is the hinge. The Man in the Black Coat Turns (1981) moves from snowbanks that stop six feet from the house to Noah at ten, Emily Dickinson's grave with Robert Francis, the grief of men, and the culvert's thousand-year serpent.
- The couple feeds a third body. Loving a Woman in Two Worlds (1985) names the relationship as a living third presence, neither fusion nor two isolates, and loves from what is still unfinished.
- Appetite gets named, not flattered. Meditations on the Insatiable Soul (1994) sits through Jacob Bly's dying in seven parts, then names the culture's greedy soul and its talk shows.
- Bless the dragon. The Bernt Notke St. George sculpture becomes a poem where Bly sides with the swamp monster the solar boy is killing: the dragon carries the forgotten father-spirit.
- Daily practice replaces system. Morning Poems (1997) writes each morning from pitchfork, farm dog, applause envy, and a yellow dot; tone turns shorter, wryer, more instructional.
- Stevens is revised, not dropped. The late Stevens poems keep his moon-voice and drop the gods-are-dead swagger; William Stafford returns as the ethic of listening.
- Vico frames history as cycle. "A Poem for Giambattista Vico Written by the Pacific" folds sacred, aristocratic, and democratic ages into a beach walk.
- The ghazal binds praise to mud. The Night Abraham Called to the Stars (2001) adopts six three-line stanzas with a returning end word, then sets Abraham, Giordano Bruno, Rembrandt's Titus, Ypres, and the Baal Shem inside that form.
- History has an invoice. "The Battle at Ypres, 1915" and "How This Wealth Came to Be" ask who paid for the Bentley and the comfort; war's morning gaiety is refused.
- Joy can be a sentence. My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy (2005) brings in Shabistari, Sufi teachers, sitar and tabla, the Iraq-era "Call and Answer," and the judge who sentences callused hands to a thousand years of joy.
- Late speech is plain and funny. Talking into the Ear of a Donkey (2011) keeps screen-door words of the long-married, children turning deep-sea fish, and the family drink problem named without a meeting.
- Limit is the last fidelity. "What the Old Poets Failed to Say" ends the collection: whatever the old poets failed to say will never be said. Snowy Fields silence returns as a permanent boundary.
- Read motifs across books. Crow, snow, father, brother, mother, water, animals, and the two worlds recur; tracking them across decades yields more than reading any single book.
Motifs across fifty years
| Motif | First strong appearance | Later transformation |
|---|---|---|
| Snow / field | Snowy Fields (1962) | Snow as answer in Tree; snowbanks six feet from the house in Black Coat |
| Crow | Crow over ark mud (1962) | Crow's head on the window sash (1979) |
| Two worlds | Boehme epigraphs (1967) | Ordinary room and holy heat in Loving a Woman (1985) |
| Shadow / brother | Sleepers sequence (1973) | Prose of No. 06 and No. 10; dragon blessed (1994) |
| Father | Finding the Father (1977) | Hospital vigil (1994); "If you see Jacob, tell him I am his son" (2011) |
| Body | Protozoa lover (1977) | Insatiable soul's appetite (1994) |
| Animals | Lobsters, seal, starfish (1975) | Farm dog (1997); pelicans (2005); donkey (2011) |
| Silence / limit | Solitude poems (1962) | What will never be said (2011) |
Forms and methods
| Method | Book(s) | What it lets Bly do |
|---|---|---|
| Deep image | Snowy Fields, Light | Leap from object to psyche without argument |
| Political lyric | Light, Sleepers | Indict named power with surreal detail |
| Long associative poem | Sleepers | Braid private and national shadow |
| Prose poem | Morning Glory, Camphor, parts of Tree | Look slowly until the object shows independence |
| Sequence / vigil | Insatiable Soul | Stay with the dying father across seven parts |
| Morning poem | Morning Poems | Daily practice; wry instruction |
| Ghazal | Abraham, Sentence, residue in Donkey | Returning end word binds praise, history, and self-address |
| Plain miniature | Donkey | Family speech, humour, accepted limit |
Who's who
| Person / figure | Role in the poems |
|---|---|
| Robert Bly | Poet; Minnesota farm son; later men's-movement author |
| Jacob Bly | Father; the dying of Insatiable Soul; "About My Father" |
| Ruth Bly | Wife; "For Ruth" in Morning Poems (1997) |
| Noah | Son; "For My Son Noah, Ten Years Old" |
| James Wright | Friend; dawn boat poem; "Letter to James Wright" |
| William Stafford | Friend; listening ethic; elegies in 1994 and 2011 |
| Wallace Stevens | Early model; revised in Morning Poems |
| Jacob Boehme | Mystic; two-worlds epigraphs of 1967 |
| Tao Yuan-Ming, Wang Wei | Chinese poets behind Tree and Jumping Out of Bed |
| Basho | Morning glory of the 1975 preface |
| Emily Dickinson, Robert Francis | Grave visit in Black Coat |
| Bernt Notke | Sculptor of the St. George poem |
| Vico, Bruno, Rembrandt, Baal Shem, Bacon | Thinkers and painters inside the ghazals |
| Shabistari, Nurbakhsh | Sufi teachers of the 2005 book |
About this book
Collected Poems by Robert Bly, 2018. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions