Bly, robert eating the honey of words

EATING THE
HONEY OF WORDS
New and Selected Poems

Robert Bly


FOR MARY, WESLEY, BRIDGET, NOAH, MICAH,
AND SAM


Contents

I: Early Poems (1950—55)

1

Seasons in the North Woods

3

A Home in Dark Grass

4

Living in the Fire

5

When the Dumb Speak

6

Where We Must Look for Help

7

A Dispute

8

Awakening

9

Unrest

10

Three Choral Stanzas

11

A Poem for the Drunkard President

12

II: Silence in the Snowy Fields (1958—78)

13

Waiting for Night to Come

15

Night

16

Snowfall in the Afternoon

17

A Private Fall

18

Late at Night During a Visit of Friends

19

Old Boards

20

Solitude Late at Night in the Woods

21

Surprised by Evening

22


Three Kinds of Pleasures

23

The Call Away

24

After Drinking All Night with a Friend, We Go Out in
a Boat at Dawn to See Who Can Write the Best Poem

25

Poem in Three Parts

26

Watering the Horse

26

Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter

27

Waking from Sleep

27

Driving Toward the Lac Qui Parle River

28

Love Poem

29

“Taking the Hands”

29

First Snowfall

29

After Working

30

A Man Writes to a Part of Himself

31

Depression

32

The Mansion

33

After Long Busyness

34

The Moon

34

Thinking of Tu Fu’s Poem

35

After Spending a Week Alone

36

Winter Privacy Poems at the Shack

37

Moses’s Basket

39

Passing an Orchard by Train

40

III: The Light Around the Body (1957—70)

41


Confusions

44

Winter Afternoon in Greenwich Village

46

Calling to the Badger

47

Sleet Storm on the Merritt Parkway

48

Melancholia

49

Three Presidents

50

The Executive’s Death

52

Smothered by the World

53

Come with Me

54

A Pint of Whisky and Five Cigars

55

Those Being Eaten by America

56

Written in Dejection Near Rome

57

Max Ernst and the Tortoise’s Beak

58

Evolution from the Fish

59

Looking into a Face

60

A Month of Happiness

60

The Celtic Church

61

Opening an Oyster on Rue Jacob

62

Romans Angry About the Inner World

63

As the Asian War Begins

64

Counting Small-Boned Bodies

65

Hatred of Men with Black Hair

66

Johnson’s Cabinet Watched by Ants

67


After the Industrial Revolution, All Things Happen at
Once

68

Hurrying Away From the Earth

69

IV: The Teeth Mother Naked at Last (1970—72)

71

The Teeth Mother Naked at Last

73

V: The Point Reyes Poems (1965—84)

83

November Day at McClure’s Beach

85

The Starfish

86

Driving West in 1970

88

Welcoming a Child in the Limantour Dunes

89

Climbing up Mount Vision with My Little Boy

90

Calm Morning at Drake’s Bay

91

Trespassing on the Pierce Ranch

92

The Dead Seal

93

An Octopus

95

The Hockey Poem

96

Two Sounds When We Sit by the Ocean

100

Sitting on Some Rocks in Shaw Cove

101

Looking at a Dead Wren in My Hand

102

A Hollow Tree

102

August Rain

103

Warning to the Reader

104

The Mushroom

105

A Chunk of Amethyst

106


VI: Loving a Woman in Two Worlds (1973—81)

107

The Third Body

109

The Horses at the Tank

110

The Whole Moisty Night

110

One Morning

111

Winter Poem

112

At Midocean

113

Listening to the Köln Concert

114

Love Poem in Twos and Threes

115

Poem on Sleep

116

The Horse of Desire

117

Conversation with a Holy Woman Not Seen for Many

Years

119

Two Middle-Aged Lovers

119

In Rainy September

120

The Indigo Bunting

121

In the Time of Peony Blossoming

122

The Moose

123

The Ram

123

The Eagle

124

The Heron Drinking

124

In the Month of May

125

A Dream of an Afternoon with a Woman I Did Not
Know

126

Love Poem About a Spinning Wheel

127


The Storm

128

A Man and a Woman and a Blackbird

129

The Ant on the Board

131

A Love That I Have in Secret

132

The Red Sea

133

Come Live with Me

133

An Evening When the Full Moon Rose as the Sun Set

134

VII: This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood
(1973—80)

135

Walking Swiftly

137

Blessings on the Body’s Inner Furnace

138

Wings Folding Up

139

Going Out to Check the Ewes

140

Four Adventures of the Soul

141

We Love This Body

142

Finding the Father

143

The Cry Going Out Over Pastures

144

The Owlets at Nightfall

145

The Lover’s Body as a Community of Protozoa

146

The Orchard Keeper

148

Blessings on the Dweller

149

VIII: The Man in the Black Coat Turns (1980—84)

151

Snowbanks North of the House

153

The Sense of Decline

154


Night Frogs

155

My Wife’s Painting

156

Visiting Emily Dickinson’s Grave with Robert Francis

158

Mourning Pablo Neruda

160

Fifty Men Sitting Together

163

The Visit to Hawaii

166

The Winemaker and the Captain

170

The Prodigal Son

172

Eleven O’Clock at Night

173

Kennedy’s Inauguration

175

An Anecdote About My Father

178

Kneeling Down to Look into a Culvert

179

Words Rising

180

IX: Meditations on the Insatiable Soul (1990—94)

183

Time Runs Backward After Death

185

Visiting My Father

186

In the Funeral Home

198

A Week After Your Death

201

St. George and the Dragon

202

When William Stafford Died

204

Gratitude to Old Teachers

205

The Dark Egg

206

Drinking the Water

207

Thoughts in the Cabin

208

X: Morning Poems (1993—97)

209

Why We Don’t Die

211

Early Morning in Your Room

212

Calling Your Father

213

The Shocks We Put Our Pitchforks Into

214

Conversation with the Soul

215

The Yellow Dot

216

Three-Day Fall Rain

217

What Jesus Said

218

When Threshing Time Ends

219

Tasting Heaven

220

Wallace Stevens and Florence

221

The Waltz

222

Looking at the Stars

223

Waking on the Farm

224

What the Animals Paid

225

For Ruth

226

The Man Who Didn’t Know What Was His

227

Thinking About Old Jobs

228

Conversation with a Monster

229

The Resemblance Between Your Life and a Dog

230

It Is So Easy to Give In

231

The Green Cookstove

232

The Russian

233


The Face in the Toyota

234

Two Ways to Write Poems

235

One Source of Bad Information

236

My Doubts on Going to Visit a New Friend

237

Visiting Sand Island

238

A Week of Poems at Bennington

239

All These Stories

244

Things to Think

245

The Glimpse of Something in the Oven

246

It’s As If Someone Else Is with Me

247

When My Dead Father Called

249

Words the Dreamer Spoke to My Father in Maine

250

Looking at Aging Faces

251

At Christmas Poem

253

People Like Us

254

The Neurons Who Watch Birds

255

Bad People

256

Wanting More Applause at a Conference

257

A Conversation with a Mouse

258

XI: New Poems (1997—98)

259

Poem for Eudalia

261

Going Home with the World

262

An Afternoon in June

263

A Poem Beginning with a Line by Seal Scholars

264


The Dog That Pursues Us

265

The Day We Visited New Orleans

266

A Dog, a Policeman, and the Spanish Poetry Reading

267

Thinking of Gitanjali

269

The Donkey’s Ear

270

Acknowledgments
About the Author
Other Books by Robert Bly
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher


I

EARLY POEMS
1950—55



SEASONS IN THE NORTH WOODS
1

The wheeling blue-bill mallards all night long
With whistling wings curve down from gravelly clouds,
While down below them, crazed on the chill lakes,
The loons shake out their wings, dive down, and rise,
Cry back up in reply. The Star that reaches
Far past the Chair and the rush of Charles’s Wain,
Bends down, and pondering in the blaze of night,

Lifts fish from chill pits into April streams.
2

Cracking weed shells, and thwacking bills on bark,
The agile companies of April sit
As quaint and graceful as medieval guilds.
Now the ruffed grouse beat their wings on rotting logs,
And throb the spring away. Farmers dig holes,
And women bring their lunch through wooded paths.
Standing among the popple, the old hired man
Hoists stones, and lifts his shirttail to his face.
3

Then soon, how soon, the summer’s days are gone;
And blackbirds form in flocks, their duties through.
And now the last autumnal freedom comes:
Zumbrota acorns drop, sun-pushed as plums,
To half-wild hogs in Cerro Gordo trees,

3


And disappointed bees, with half-gold knees
Sail home. It’s done. October’s cold is sweet,
And winter will be stamping of the feet.

A HOME IN DARK GRASS
In the deep fall the body awakes
And we find lions on the seashore—
Nothing to fear.

The wind rises; the water is born,
Spreading white tomb-clothes on a rocky shore,
Drawing us up
From the bed of the land.
We did not come to remain whole.
We came to lose our leaves like the trees,
Trees that start again,
Drawing up from the great roots.
So men captured by the Moors
Wake, rowing in the cold ocean
Air, living a second life.
That we should learn of poverty and rags,
That we should taste the weed of Dillinger,
And swim in the sea,
Not always walking on dry land,
And, dancing, find in the trees a savior,
A home in dark grass,
And nourishment in death.


LIVING IN THE FIRE

No teak, nor piracies of marble
Can match this pain,
Not diamonds nor thyme
Nor smoke of hyacinth
No emeralds reach this pain,
Which is gorgeous
Oh Abraham! More than choirs
Of teak or the owls of Spain.

5


WHEN THE DUMB SPEAK

There’s a joyful night in which we lose
Everything, and drift
Like a radish
Rising and falling, and the ocean at last
Throws us into the ocean;
In that ocean we are sinking
As if floating on darkness.
The body raging,
And driving itself, disappearing in smoke:
Walks in large cities late at night,
Reading the Bible in Christian Science windows,
Or reading a history of Bougainville:
Then the images appear—
Images of grief,
Images of the body shaken in the grave,
And the graves filled with seawater;
Fires in the sea,
Bodies smoldering like ships,
Images of wasted life,
Life lost, imagination ruined,
The house fallen,
The gold sticks broken!
Then shall the talkative be silent
And the dumb will speak.

6


WHERE WE MUST LOOK FOR HELP

The dove returns; it found no resting place;
It was in flight all night above the shaken seas.
Beneath Ark eaves
The dove shall magnify the tiger’s bed;
Give the dove peace.
The split-tail swallows leave the sill at dawn;
At dusk blue swallows shall return.
On the third day the crow shall fly;
The crow, the crow, the spider-colored crow,
The crow shall find new mud to walk upon.

7


A DISPUTE

The Lazy Man: In my dream I saw flowers.
White flowers covered the hill.
When I came near, I saw
Swords lay among the flowers.
The Tense Man: And I have cut the stony spur
That laid unruly arms on the lawn,
And cut to make that sure
Green energy be gone.

The Lazy Man: When the sweet man dies, stabbed
By the boar, and his blood
Darkens the river, young girls
Beat their small breasts and cry.
The Tense Man: If love, girl love, is but a jaunt,
A fall that journeys to no spring,
Then who will make the loaves
And cry the calls to prayer?
The Lazy Man: I saw flowers in my dream.
White flowers covered the hill.
When I came near, I saw
Swords lay among the flowers.

8


AWAKENING

We are approaching sleep: the chestnut blossoms in the mind
Mingle with thoughts of pain,
And the long roots of barley, bitterness
As of the oak roots staining the water dark
In Louisiana, the wet streets soaked with rain
And sodden blossoms, out of this
We have come, a tunnel softly hurtling into darkness.
The storm is coming. The small farmhouse in Minnesota
Is hardly strong enough for the storm.
Darkness, darkness in the grasses, darkness in trees.
Even the water in wells trembles.
Bodies give off darkness, and chrysanthemums

Are dark, and horses, who are bearing great loads of hay
To the deep barns where the dark air is moving from the
corners.
Lincoln’s statue, and the traffic. From the long past
Into the long present
A bird forgotten in these pressures, warbling,
As the great wheel turns around, grinding
The living in water.
Washing, continual washing, in water now stained
With blossoms and rotting logs, cries halfMuffled, from beneath the earth, the living finally as awake
as the dead.

9


UNREST

A strange unrest hovers over the nation:
This is the last dance, the wild tossing of Morgan’s seas,
The division of spoils.
A lassitude enters into the diamonds
Of the body. In high school the explosion begins,
The child is partly killed. When the fight is over,
And the land and the sea
Ruined, two shapes inside us rise, and move away.
But the baboon whistles on the shores of death—
Climbing and falling, tossing nuts and stones,
He gambols by the tree
Whose branches hold the expanses of cold,
The planets whirling and the black sun,

The cries of insects, and the tiny slaves
In the prisons of bark:
Charlemagne, we are approaching your islands!
We are returning now to the snowy trees,
Charlemagne, through which you rode all night
With stiff hands. Now
The darkness is falling, in which we sleep
And wake, a darkness in which thieves shudder
And the insane have a hunger for snow,
And stiff-faced men like me
Fall on their knees in the dungeons of sleep.

10


THREE CHORAL STANZAS
1

I have gone down the old Tobacco Trail;
All over Tennessee the dead stand up
And shake the briars out of ballad bones!
Those torn in Shiloh meadows come alive.
I saw the worms march into Cumberland
And slumbering trees shout out the welcome there
To shrouds approaching from the Donner Pass.
2

The moon shines down on the Spanish battlefield.
There crumpled, trampled, pierced, or prone and whole,
The pale steel knights lie dead in weeds and gleam,

Friends raise them up, remove the bowels and lungs,
And in the cavities lay evergreens.
Tenderly they lift the dead to wagon-floors,
And men with wounds are bound on boughs of pine.
3

We write long poems, and make high towers, because
Those traveling to the grave do not return.
What has wild Pliny sent back since he died?
And dust has muffled Blackhawk’s awkward tongue.
The dead do not come back; it is because
No word returns that we will never give in,
Nor without crowns will we be satisfied.

11


A POEM FOR THE DRUNKARD PRESIDENT

Columbus guessed that below the Jamaican hills
There were cobalt porcelains, Geese Flying
Amid Three Clouds, Shang incense burners,
Hares made of gold pounding jade rice.
He died in chains, in a dungeon, growling like a dog.
Coronado, hankering for Cibola’s cities, inquired
Of the Cherokees. They said, “Go to Kansas.” His men
Buried DeSoto at night beneath the Mississippi.
Little Crow died with skunk-fur bands on his wrists.
Long Head charged the rifles naked. Some men
Taunted the Algonquins while tied to the stake.

Others died on high scaffolds in Texas;
Hat Sutton died in Great Neck on a rope.
MacKenzie broke up on the Labrador rocks.
These risky ones died in ambushes, in dance
Halls, with cow skulls in the Snake River snows.
A soldier wrote to his mother: “Today we marched
Back, after a battle, to our previous position
In a heavy rain. We passed a drunk man
Asleep in the ditch. It was General Grant.”
All the old singing says it: It will all
End in ashes. The kept life is the lost life.
It is still true. What moves us in our tents?
The spectacle of Grant, lying drunk, in the rain.

12