The Poets We Carry
(I Knew a Poet, Once…)

There are many poets who speak to us at various stages in our development as writers. We usually remember them by a line, a poem, a photograph, an anecdote but inevitably move on in our own pursuit to write, maybe having learned something from them or maybe forgetting them entirely. They said something important to us once, though. They caught our eye, our sense of what it meant to be a writer at a time in our lives when we needed to hear what they had to say. Something about them seeped into the unconscious, only to be retrieved years later by a poem, a line, an image, all of which suddenly comes back to haunt us upon the realization that poet’s life has ended.

What remains?

Something like this happened last month when I came to the obit section of the New York Times and saw the announcement of Robert Creeley’s death. He was 78. He was part of that legendary Black Mountain College bunch. All his serious poetic credentials and history were there in the obit--or easily accessed on the web. But this is not what Creeley left me.

I studied the photo of him taken in the 1970’s-black hair, mustache, modified goatee. Hawk eyes, chiseled chin. Creeley, all right. But not the picture of him I remember.

I carry an image of a young Creeley, much the same chiseled features as the Time’s obit photo, except my memory includes a black patch over one eye-and a crow, either perched on his shoulder or somewhere very near him. Possibly a southwestern setting. Whenever I think of Creeley, I think of that photo-the black eye patch, the black crow. I don’t know why.

Nor am I sure where or if this photo ever appeared. Perhaps I saw it on one of his books, though not the only book of his on my shelf: WORDS, Poems by Robert Creeley, 1967, $2.25. Or his work contained in the l972 anthology CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POETRY, edited by Donald Hall, $2.95. Yeah, that’s how much time has passed.

I have not visited his work in a long time. He was noted, as I recall, for writing those long, thin poems. But a quick look in WORDS reveals there were really not that many long, thin poems. There’s a smiling Creeley on the back cover of WORDS. Not the photo I possess-not the image of him I carry with me still.

I only remember two of his poems. One about rain and a woman. It was a very impressionistic, romantic time for me no doubt when I read that poem--wanting and loving that same combination: rain and a woman. And the words to write about it the way Creeley did:

The Rain

All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon,
so often? Is it

that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling,
will have for me,

something other than this,
something not so insistent-
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.

This seems a different poem to me today. Not exactly as I remember it.
But I find myself liking it even more, as I too a am different person, living in a different time.

The other, even more memorable poem of Creeley’s, (“I Know a Man”), contained a number lines which have been in my head ever since I first read it. And I am not alone in taking this poem to heart and mind, almost entirely,
never comprehending completely all the beauty and humor, darkness and mystery it offers.

I’d like to believe that Creeley hit the dark road for the last time with a smile on his chiseled face, a crow watching him from a fence post, and this poem humming in his head:

I KNOW A MAN

As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking, --John, I

sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for
christ’s sake, look
out where yr going.