On the Death of Robert Creeley

On the death of Robert Creeley


"Meditate on the word's distractions
and see what you find."
Paolo Honorificas

a.
What is most difficult to hear
comes in whispers,
as if one good or bad deed
secretly craves another.
This was supposed to be
about Robert Creeley.
It's about us all.
A meditation on broken things.
Where should I begin?
With found thoughts?
Condensed emotions?
The history of American words
in the latter half of the 20th. century?
A history of chance meetings, drugs,
dreams gone bad, sad faces,
mental illness, art, human
frailty, exile, war and a hunger
always unsatisfied, rising from the failure
of words to sustain.
A time of dismembering voices;
lost, haunting
the lonely ghost towns of exhaustion.
A time burdened by global meltdowns,
plots, body bags and the dirty laundry
of countless human humiliations,
a breathless time pleading
from the dark house
of its corrupting century.
Struggling to be made whole again.
You tell me,
was it a house of seduction,
tragedy or horrendous humor.
Did it validate the power of words
or rape them?
Did they represent a blessing or cursing,
did they matter or mean anything at all?

b.
Let me tell you what I saw and heard.
The cultural scene was like watching
a movie. The screen filled with violence
and loss while three rows down, two
young lovers were lost in some beautiful
time warp. They choked on their own
awkwardness. They spoke in tongues,
like saintly deceivers deceiving nobody
but themselves while the advertised
special, brittle and two dimensional,
flickered on and on and on.

c.
The twentieth century Hitler bug
wears a mask.
He lives around the block.
You wouldn’t recognize him. He comes in
the form of twisting reality
into a virus, mutating truth into
a preconceived point of view.
He's taking a leak in front of you.
His end justifies his means.
He could be an artist.
He could be a radio pundit.
He could be a popular religious
televangelist. He could be taking Prozac
and sporting a crap eat'n grin.
Guaranteed, the Queen of Hell
as the Sister of Satan is still
feeding him lines like:
*See, in my line of work
you got to keep repeating things
over and over
for the truth to sink in,
to catapult the propaganda.*

d.
Last year I was diagnosed
with a bad case of Optimism.
Today, everything smells like poached fish.
I ramble on inconsequentially
like I'm bandaging wounds, clearing
congested lungs, distracted, wondering;
if there is truly
a God of infinite compassion,
grace and power,
who organizes heavenly things
and resides in our thoughts,
wouldn't we all have wings?
Robert Creeley is dead.
The artist in him hunted
with the mind of a gun, stalking
the craftily elusive word
that was too beautiful to die,
so he killed it and mounted it
and became one instead.

e.
Robert Creeley is dead.
People sucked up to him.
I never met the man.
He published sixty books
and I have a suspicion that if he lived
longer he would have published sixty more.
What was he afraid of?
Was it the curse of the 20th. century?
His words are copyrighted,
their own medium of exchange.
He wasn't Whitman. He wasn't Ginsberg.
He was Robert Creeley.
He was better than most
and more than we deserved.

2005 Scott Malby

Posted over on A Little Poetry