Thursday, January 26, 2012

fill in the blanks


I liked your "fill in the blanks" idea so....
Here are 3 short poems by Robert Bly and we'll do the same as we did with the poem "Red"
The Conditions

What we have together is, with the greatest deference, a mess.

ever, and forever!

So my sentiments are with someone far less prone to neuroses  moving far into the intangible part of the universe, where

the oats of our regret will seed themselves, daintily and with the greatest pleasure.

I was a black-face Al Jolson!

You were the alabaster fainting magnolia.

I pretended to pretend, sang  on

before I agreed the rift in the centre of us, was irrevocable.




Ferns

It was snake-green  ferns I gathered for you, tossing them about the villa (with glee).

Ignoring your manservant, crushing fern spores in your wardrobe:  ah, there is a _sacred place.

Through you I came to adore snakes where they hide in amongst  the ferns  on that  _day in early June,

and the curve the snakes design during their love-making, the unmistakable mark he  leaves in the  corner of my brain..



Secrets

I climb the aspen, the over-bending suppleness of its branches,

resisting ownership, so that you and I together in the copse, are doomed to failure.

It is an unbearably lovely lintel  of an ancient open door,

a _burden that can  no longer be held close to that space on your sunburned thighs  in the solace that is twilight at the villa.

Are there any portals that can let us through, together, or only the water-soaked oak that keeps us in?

The lovers who dance outside in twilight live through the flood; but to those who install locks, they let  no one enter;  no one comes,

selling diaphanous cloaks at noon in the too-supple  woods....

These gypsies long to tell your fortune, to dance with you by a rising moon, wistfully stared  at by deer eating aspen leaves in the copse..

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