Friday, March 6, 2009

Of Rain and Flowers: Two Poems by Robert Creeley

The Rain
ROBERT CREELEY

All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it

that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me

something other than this,
something not so insistent—
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.

--
The Flower
ROBERT CREELEY

I think I grow tensions
like flowers
in a wood where
nobody goes.

Each wound is perfect,
encloses itself in a tiny
imperceptible blossom,
making pain.

Pain is a flower like that one,
like this one,
like that one,
like this one.

4 comments:

redgrevillea said...

Lovely stuff. I particularly like 'The Flower' - it captures "it" perfectly.

I just read about him in wiki, he died only recently it seems.

I'm keen to follow him up.

Kinds, Ross

Anonymous said...

I personally found Creeley just last fall while perusing the poetry shelf at our local Barnes & Noble.

In near perfect synchronicity, I had stumbled across him shortly before or after purchasing his volume of collected works, when I did a google search using the term one eye, or lost eye (or something like this).

I was conducting some background research for a character in one of my stories who has a maligned eye. The search returned a New York Times article on Creeley, which further intensified my hunger for his words and life story.

He was without a doubt a most beautiful man--body and soul. I wish I had had the opportunity to know him.

3brainer said...

yep! I once thought of pain being a mushroom or fungus, because it grows in the darkness then bursts into the light of day. ahhh poetry.

ScaughtFive said...

He made sense.