Robert Bly: Harvard classmate to Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, George Plimpton and others

• Living at the End of Time
• There is so much sweetness in children’s voices,
• And so much discontent at the end of day,
• And so much satisfaction when a train goes by.

• I don’t know why the rooster keeps crying,
• Nor why elephants keep raising their trunks,
• Nor why Hawthorne kept hearing trains at night.

• A handsome child is a gift from God,
• And a friend is a vein in the back of the hand,
• And a wound is an inheritance from the wind.

• Some say we are living at the end of time,
• But I believe a thousand pagan ministers
• Will arrive tomorrow to baptize the wind.

• There’s nothing we need to do about John. The Baptist
• Has been laying his hands on earth for so long
• That the well water is sweet for a hundred miles.

• It’s all right if we don’t know what the rooster
• Is saying in the middle of the night, nor why we feel
• So much satisfaction when a train goes by.

• A Month of Happiness
• A blind horse stands among cherry trees.
• And bones shine from cool earth.
• The heart leaps
• Almost up to the sky! But laments
• And filaments pull us back into the dark.
• Night takes us. But
• A paw
• Comes out of the dark
• To light the road. I’ll be all right.
• I follow my own fiery traces through the night. 

• Waking from Sleep
• Inside the veins there are navies setting forth
• Tiny explosions at the water lines
• And seagulls weaving in the wind of the salty blood.

• It is the morning. The country has slept the whole winter.
• Window seats were covered with fur skins, the yard was full
• Of stiff dogs and hands that clumsily held heavy books.

• Now we wake and rise from bed and eat breakfast!—
• Shouts rise from the harbor of the blood
• Mist and masts rising the knock of wooden tackle in the sunlight.

• Now we sing and do tiny dances on the kitchen floor.
• Our whole body is like a harbor at dawn;
• We know that our master has left us for the day.

Robert Bly (b. 1926) is an American poet also well known for a leading figure in the “mythopoetic men’s movement,” a self-improvement program for men popular in the 1980s and 1990s. Winner of the 1968 National Book Award, Bly is a Minnesota native and attended Harvard University as a student, after transferring from St. Olaf College in his home state. He became classmates at Harvard with fellow poets and writers Donald Hall (with whom he formed a lifelong friendship), Adrienne Rich, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and George Plimpton. Bly’s poetry is characterized by simple diction and direct presentation of imagery.