Poem for July 23

Self Portrait

He wants to be
a brutal old man,
an aggressive old man,
as dull, as brutal
as the emptiness around him.

He doesn’t want compromise,
nor ever to be nice
to anyone. Just mean,
and final in his brutal,
his total, rejection of it all.

He tried the sweet,
the gentle, the “oh
let’s hold hands together”
and it was awful,
dull, brutally inconsequential.

Now he’ll stand on
his own dwindling legs.
His arms, his skin,
shrink daily. And
he loves but hates equally.

-Robert Creeley, from Echoes (Toothpaste Press, 1982)

Poem for July 8

To And

To and
back and forth,
direction
is a third.

or simple fourth
of the intention
like it
goes and goes.

No
more snow this
winter?
No more snow.

Then what replaces
all the faces,
wasted,
wasted.

-Robert Creeley, from For Love (Scribner,1962), reprinted in The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945-1975 (University of California Press, 1982)