CONJUNCTIONS:2 Spring 1982

Five Poems Robert Creeley

TWO KIDS Two kids, small black sculpture. In trepidation she turns to him who bends forward to, as they say, assist her. It is, the proposal is, her fear provokes her, fear of a frog crouching at the far end of this banal, small, heavy hunk of metal must have cost a pretty penny so to arouse in mind's back recesses a comfortable sense of incest? Or else the glass table top on which it sits so isolates this meager action --or else the vegetation, the fern stalks, beside them hang over, making privacy a seeming thought of these two who, as Keats said, will never move nor will any of it beyond the moment, the small minutes of some hour, like waiting in a dentist's office. ONE WORLD Tonight possibly they'll invite us down to the barricades finally sans some tacit racism or question of our authenticity. No one will be ashamed he has to fact the prospect of being blown up alone in the privacy of his own home. One can be looted, burned, bombed, etc., in company, a Second World War sequel for real, altogether, now and forever. RETROSPECT Thanks for what will be the memory if it is. OUTSIDE The light not meets with the shuddering branch. What I see distorts the image. This is an age of slow determinations, goes up the stairs with dulled will. Who would accept death as an end thinks he can do what he wants to. THE FACES The faces with anticipated youth look out from the current identifications, judge or salesman, the neighbor, the man who killed, mattering only as the sliding world they betoken, the time it never mattered to accumulate, the fact that nothing mattered but for what one could make of it, some passing, oblique pleasure, a pain immense in its intensity, a sly but insistent yearning to outwit it all, be different, move far, far away, avoid forever the girl next door, whose cracked, wrinkled smile will persist, still know you.