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Two Poems by Robert Bly

By Robert Hass
October 25, 1998

It has idly crossed my mind that, in human societies, the fall has traditionally been the time of scapegoat rituals. But I reminded myself that the release of the Starr Report materials and the grand jury video were timed to do as much damage as possible before the November elections and not to clear the fields of the lingering and resentful spirits of the earth we have plowed and harvested in the months of the growing cycle. Halloween is our way of buying off the ghouls of autumn, whatever Congress may have in mind.

Here, anyway, is a poem of the fall with its sense-quickening feel of life and death. It comes from a pleasant and very readable new anthology, "Wild Song: Poems of the Natural World," edited by John Daniel and published by the University of Georgia Press. This one is by Robert Bly:

A Private Fall

Motes of haydust rise and fall
with slow and grave steps,
like servants who dance in the yard
because some prince has been born.

What has been born? The winter. Then the
Egyptians were right.
Everything wants a chance to die,
to begin in the clear fall air.

Each leaf sinks and goes down
when we least expect it.
We glance toward the window for some
thing has caught our eye.

It's possible autumn is a tomb out of which
a child is born.
We feel a secret joy
and we tell no one!

Robert Bly's newest book is "Morning Poems" (HarperFlamingo). It is a record of a project he undertook of writing a poem every morning, as his friend William Stafford had done. The project may have been a self-administered cure for Bly's traumatic distraction of having written a bestseller. Bly's "Iron John" and the subsequent parody of its ideas in various television shows had made him the kind of public figure it's not very helpful for a poet to be. He seems to have responded by staying in bed and writing poems, which was, I think, a very admirable solution. And the poems, even the darkest of them, have a fresh playfulness. You can feel the way his imagination has been cut loose by the practice.
I ran into him on a fall morning a couple of years ago. He was chuckling to himself, looking both pleased and a little bewildered. I asked him what was on his mind and he explained what he'd been doing, and said that on that morning, for example, he'd had a conversation with a mouse about sleeping curled up versus sleeping stretched out, and written a poem about it. He recited it to me on the spot. I was amused to see that it had become the final poem in "Morning Poems":

A Conversation With a Mouse

One day a mouse called to me from his curly nest:
"How do you sleep? I love curliness."
"Well, I like to be stretched out. I like my bones to be
All lined up. I like to see my toes way off over there."

"I suppose that's one way," the mouse said,
"but I don't like it.
The planets don't act that way, nor the Milky Way."

What could I say? You know you're near the end
Of the century when a sleepy mouse brings in the Milky Way.

From "Wild Song: Poems of the Natural World," edited by John Daniel and published by the University of Georgia Press. This poem first appeared in Wilderness magazine. Reprinted with permission.

Robert Hass, former U.S. poet laureate, is the author, most recently, of the collection "Sun Under Wood."

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