A Hollow Tree,"
1.
I bend over an old hollow cottonwood stump, still
standing, waist high, and look inside. Early spring.
Its Siamese temple walls are all brown and ancient.
The walls have been worked on by the intricate ones.
Inside the hollow walls there is privacy and secrecy,
dim light. And yet some creature has died there.
On the temple floor feathers, gray feathers,
many of them with a fluted white tip. Many feathers.
In the silence many feathers.
2.
I bend over an old hollow cottonwood stump,
still standing, waist high, and look inside.
Early spring.
Its Siamese temple walls
are all brown and ancient.
The walls have been worked on
by the intricate ones.
Inside the hollow walls there is privacy
and secrecy, dim light.
And yet some creature has died there.
On the temple floor feathers, gray feathers,
many of them with a fluted white tip.
Many feathers.
In the silence many feathers.
Robert Bly 1974
1. Robert Bly's prose poem.
2. Line Breaks by Glenn Buttkus
2 comments:
I never knew how good Robert Bly is. Thanks for sharing.
And never stick your hand into a tree knot-hole, you may not get it back.
This poem seems unedited from its original version, which I read and found so memorable 30 years ago. Looking at a Dead Ween in My Hand, however, is not available as it first appeared in print in The Morning Glory. That is "Your bill is brown, with the sorrow of an old Jew whose daughter has married an athlete" has been changed to "rabbi." I'm sure others have pointed this out; and it seems ridiculous to me that poetry editors would think readers and followers of Bly or any other writer would not see it, unacknowledged. The same type of revisions have occurred in reissues of novels by James Salter, unacknowledged by the publisher. For people who take such valued words, ideas, and phrases to heart as we do, this amounts to a kind of literary treason censorship that is unacceptable in a purported democracy that enshrined freedom of speech.
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