For Love

For Love


by Robert Creeley

for Bobbie


Yesterday I wanted to
speak of it, that sense above
the others to me
important because all


that I know derives
from what it teaches me.
Today, what is it that
is finally so helpless,


different, despairs of its own
statement, wants to
turn away, endlessly
to turn away.


If the moon did not ...
no, if you did not
I wouldn’t either, but
what would I not


do, what prevention, what
thing so quickly stopped.
That is love yesterday
or tomorrow, not


now. Can I eat
what you give me. I
have not earned it. Must
I think of everything


as earned. Now love also
becomes a reward so
remote from me I have
only made it with my mind.


Here is tedium,
despair, a painful
sense of isolation and
whimsical if pompous


self-regard. But that image
is only of the mind’s
vague structure, vague to me
because it is my own.


Love, what do I think
to say. I cannot say it.
What have you become to ask,
what have I made you into,


companion, good company,
crossed legs with skirt, or
soft body under
the bones of the bed.


Nothing says anything
but that which it wishes
would come true, fears
what else might happen in


some other place, some
other time not this one.
A voice in my place, an
echo of that only in yours.


Let me stumble into
not the confession but
the obsession I begin with
now. For you


also (also)
some time beyond place, or
place beyond time, no
mind left to


say anything at all,
that face gone, now.
Into the company of love
it all returns.



Robert Creeley, “For Love” from Selected Poems of Robert Creeley. Copyright © 1991 by the Regents of the University of California. Reprinted with the permission of the University of California Press, www.ucpress.edu.