Eating the Honey of Words

Robert Bly

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061979736
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

"Bly's imaginative prose poems radiate witty delight."— Library Journal

A brilliant collection spanning half a century, from one of America's most powerful poets.

Robert Bly had many roles in his illustrious career. He was a chronicler and mentor of young poets, was a leader of the antiwar movement, founded the men's movement, and wrote the bestselling book Iron John, which brought the men's movement to the attention of the world. Throughout these activities, Bly continued to deepen his own poetry, a vigorous voice in a period of more academic wordsmiths. Here he has presented his favorite poems of the last decades-timeless classics from Silence in the Snowy Fields, The Man in the Black Coat Turns, and Loving a Woman in Two Worlds. A complete section of marvelous new poems rounds out this collection, which offers a chance to reread, in a fresh setting, a lifetime of work dedicated to fresh perspectives.

I

EARLY POEMS
1950—55

SEASONS IN THE NORTH WOODS

1

The wheeling blue-bill mallards all night long

With whistling wings curve down from gravelly clouds,

While down below them, crazed on the chill lakes,

The loons shake out their wings, dive down, and rise,

Cry back up in reply. The Star that reaches

Far past the Chair and the rush of Charles’s Wain,

Bends down, and pondering in the blaze of night,

Lifts fish from chill pits into April streams.

2

Cracking weed shells, and thwacking bills on bark,

The agile companies of April sit

As quaint and graceful as medieval guilds.

Now the ruffed grouse beat their wings on rotting logs,

And throb the spring away. Farmers dig holes,

And women bring their lunch through wooded paths.

Standing among the popple, the old hired man

Hoists stones, and lifts his shirttail to his face.

3

Then soon, how soon, the summer’s days are gone;

And blackbirds form in flocks, their duties through.

And now the last autumnal freedom comes:

Zumbrota acorns drop, sun-pushed as plums,

To half-wild hogs in Cerro Gordo trees,

And disappointed bees, with half-gold knees

Sail home. It’s done. October’s cold is sweet,

And winter will be stamping of the feet.

A HOME IN DARK GRASS

In the deep fall the body awakes

And we find lions on the seashore—

Nothing to fear.

The wind rises; the water is born,

Spreading white tomb-clothes on a rocky shore,

Drawing us up

From the bed of the land.

We did not come to remain whole.

We came to lose our leaves like the trees,

Trees that start again,

Drawing up from the great roots.

So men captured by the Moors

Wake, rowing in the cold ocean

Air, living a second life.

That we should learn of poverty and rags,

That we should taste the weed of Dillinger,

And swim in the sea,

Not always walking on dry land,

And, dancing, find in the trees a savior,

A home in dark grass,

And nourishment in death.

LIVING IN THE FIRE

No teak, nor piracies of marble

Can match this pain,

Not diamonds nor thyme

Nor smoke of hyacinth

No emeralds reach this pain,

Which is gorgeous

Oh Abraham! More than choirs

Of teak or the owls of Spain.

WHEN THE DUMB SPEAK

There’s a joyful night in which we lose

Everything, and drift

Like a radish

Rising and falling, and the ocean at last

Throws us into the ocean;

In that ocean we are sinking

As if floating on darkness.

The body raging,

And driving itself, disappearing in smoke:

Walks in large cities late at night,

Reading the Bible in Christian Science windows,

Or reading a history of Bougainville:

Then the images appear—

Images of grief,

Images of the body shaken in the grave,

And the graves filled with seawater;

Fires in the sea,

Bodies smoldering like ships,

Images of wasted life,

Life lost, imagination ruined,

The house fallen,

The gold sticks broken!

Then shall the talkative be silent

And the dumb will speak.

WHERE WE MUST LOOK FOR HELP

The dove returns; it found no resting place;

It was in flight all night above the shaken seas.

Beneath Ark eaves

The dove shall magnify the tiger’s bed;

Give the dove peace.

The split-tail swallows leave the sill at dawn;

At dusk blue swallows shall return.

On the third day the crow shall fly;

The crow, the crow, the spider-colored crow,

The crow s...