A Token

My lady
fair with
soft
arms, what

can I say to
you-words, words
as if all
worlds were there.

by Robert Creeley

A Wicker Basket

Comes the time when it’s later
and onto your table the headwaiter
puts the bill, and very soon after
rings out the sound of lively laughter–

Picking up change, hands like a walrus,
and a face like a barndoor’s,
and a head without any apparent size,
nothing but two eyes–

So that’s you, man,
or me. I make it as I can,
I pick up, I go
faster than they know–

Out the door, the street like a night,
any night, and no one in sight,
but then, well, there she is,
old friend Liz–

And she opens the door of her cadillac,
I step in back,
and we’re gone.
She turns me on–

There are very huge stars, man, in the sky,
and from somewhere very far off someone hands
me a slice of apple pie,
with a gob of white, white ice cream on top of it,
and I eat it–

Slowly. And while certainly
they are laughing at me, and all around me is racket
of these cats not making it, I make it

in my wicker basket.

by Robert Creeley

Age

Most explicit–
the sense of trap

as a narrowing
cone one’s got

stuck into and
any movement

forward simply
wedges once more–

but where
or quite when,

even with whom,
since now there is no one

quite with you–Quite? Quiet?
English expression: Quait?

Language of singular
impedance? A dance? An

involuntary gesture to
others not there? What’s

wrong here? How
reach out to the

other side all
others live on as

now you see the
two doctors, behind

you, in mind’s eye,
probe into your anus,

or ass, or bottom,
behind you, the roto-

rooter-like device
sees all up, concludes

“like a worn-out inner tube,”
“old,” prose prolapsed, person’s

problems won’t do, must
cut into, cut out . . .

The world is a round but
diminishing ball, a spherical

ice cube, a dusty
joke, a fading,

faint echo of its
former self but remembers,

sometimes, its past, sees
friends, places, reflections,

talks to itself in a fond,
judgemental murmur,

alone at last.
I stood so close

to you I could have
reached out and

touched you just
as you turned

over and began to
snore not unattractively,

no, never less than
attractively, my love,

my love–but in this
curiously glowing dark, this

finite emptiness, you, you, you
are crucial, hear the

whimpering back of
the talk, the approaching

fears when I may
cease to be me, all

lost or rather lumped
here in a retrograded,

dislocating, imploding
self, a uselessness

talks, even if finally to no one,
talks and talks.

by Robert Creeley