My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy

Robert Bly

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061979842
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Poesía de Oriente Medio

Readers have found Robert Bly's ghazals startling and new; they merge wildness with a beautiful formality. The ghazal form is well-known in Islamic culture, but only now finding its way into the literary culture of the West.

Each stanza of three lines amounts to a finished poem. "God crouches at night over a single pistachio. / The vastness of the Wind River Range in Wyoming / Has no more grandeur than the waist of a child."

The ghazal's compacted energy is astounding. In a period when much American poetry is retreating into prosaic recordings of daily events, these poems do the opposite. My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy is Robert Bly's second book of ghazals. The poems have become more intricate and personal than they were in The Night Abraham Called to the Stars, and the leaps even more bold. This book includes the already famous poem against the Iraq War, "Call and Answer" "Tell me why it is we don¹t lift our voices these days / And cry over what is happening." The poems are intimate and yet reach out toward the world: the paintings of Robert Motherwell, the intensity of Flamenco singers, the sadness of the gnostics, the delight of high spirits and wit.

This book reestablishes Bly's position as one of the greatest poets of our era. After many years of free verse in American poetry, years which have been very fertile, the inventive ghazal helps the imagination to luxuriate in a form once more. We are seeing a poetry emerge that is recovering many of the great intensities that modern art and poetry has aimed at and achieved in earlier generations.

PART ONE

The Dark Autumn Nights

Imagination is the door to the raven’s house, so we are

Already blessed! The one nail that fell from the shoe

Lit the way for Newton to get home from the Fair.

Last night I heard a thousand holy women

And a thousand holy men apologize at midnight

Because there was too much triumph in their voices.

Those lovers, skinny and badly dressed, hated

By parents, did the work; all through the Middle Ages,

It was the lovers who kept the door open to heaven.

Walking home, we become distracted whenever

We pass apple orchards. We are still eating fruit

Left on the ground the night Adam was born.

St. John of the Cross heard an Arab love poem

Through the bars and began his poem. In Nevada

it was Always the falling horse that discovered the mine.

Robert, you know well how much substance can be

Wasted by lovers, but I say, Blessings on those

Who go home through the dark autumn nights.

A Poem for Andrew Marvell

Tell Tristan the tip of his tongue is beautiful.

Tell the lovers they are blessed. Tell me my poems

Are promises made a thousand years ago.

People who adore literature often say that fall

Is the best of all seasons. Erasmus loved Latin, heavy

Seas, masts breaking, ships going down.

Twice this morning I’ve kissed Marvell’s book.

He’s glad for the mourners—whose eyes are blessed

By grief, who “weep the more and see the less.”

I know that these poems mean that I am beginning

To get rid of the traces. But at this rate, I’ll

Still be washing the floor when the flood comes.

Every drop of water has inside it the strange, mad

Longing to be the ocean. I don’t need

To say why every grass blade is so thin.

Robert, your take on the fall is right. Those studying

The Kabbalah gained so much from the story

Of Ruth gleaning barley stalks in the dusk.

Listening to the Sitar Before Dawn

It is not yet dawn, and the sitar is playing.

Where are the footsteps that were so clear yesterday?

Sometimes stones have no weight at all, and clouds are heavy.

To those who want me to change, I say, “I will

Never stop traveling that road which connects

Socrates to the turtle, and Falstaff to the Baal Shem.”

Every sitar note strikes a bargain with the one

Who arranges things. One note says, “A year in heaven.”

The turgid silence says, “Two years under the earth.”

The sitar players are already pulling heaven down,

While we have hardly learned to carry earth.

Perhaps they remember all their errors in loving.

Some say that Ganesha and Catherine do the work

For us all, but I see a great deal of faithfulness

In the dragonfly with her long, skinny body.

It was still dark when the fingers began to play.

Now we who have listened so hard have nothing to say.

The wavering sitar note is the early dawn.

For David Whetstone

Loafing with Friends at Ojo Caliente

Mineral pools remember a lot about history.

Here we are at Ojo Caliente, sitting together,

Soaking up the rumble of earth’s forgetfulness.

Why should we worry if Anna Karenina ends badly?

The world is reborn each time a mouse

Puts her foot down on the dusty barn floor.

Sometimes ohs and ahs bring us joy. When

You place your life inside the vowels, the music

Opens the doors to a hundred closed nights.

People say that even in the highest heaven

If you managed to keep your ears open

You would hear angels weeping night and day.

The culture of the Etruscans has disappeared.

So many things are over. A thousand hopes

F. Scott Fitzgerald had for himself are gone.

No one is as lucky as those who live on earth.

Even the Pope finds himself longing for darkness.

The sun catches on fire in the lonely heavens.

For Hanna and Martín

When I Am with You

When I am with you, two notes of the sarod

Carry me into a place where I am not.

All the farms have disappeared into air.

Those wooden fence posts I loved as a boy—

I can see my father’s face through their ...