CONJUNCTIONS:3 Fall 1982

Four Poems Robert Creeley

THIS WALL I have looked at this wall for months, bricks faded, chipped, edge of roof fixed with icicles like teeth, arch of window above my own with curtain, blistered white paint, trim of grey blue. Specific limit-- of what? A shell of house, no one's home, wherein emptiness feels damp and tenuous under the leaky roof. Careless of what else, wall so close, insistently present to my own-- can push with eye, thinking where one can't go, those crushed to blackness, despair. This comfortable acceptance of death is no place wall can echo, either real or unreal. They stand between an inside and out. So in school years ago I saw Wall, heard Wall speak, "Thus have I, Wall, my part discharged so; And, being done, thus Wall away doth go..." Clouds above, patch of shifting blue sky. Faint sun. EATS Self-shrinking focus mode of deployment of people met in casual engagement, social-- Not the man I am or even was, have constructed some pattern, place will be as all. Bored, shrink into isolated fading out of gross, comfortable contact. Hence out to lunch. HEAVEN KNOWS Seemingly never until one's dead is there possible measure-- but of what then or what for other than the same plagues attended one living with misunderstanding and wanted a compromise as pledge one could care for any of them, heaven knows, if that's where one goes. FOR THE NEW YEAR Rid forever of them and us, the ridiculous small places of patient hates, the meager agreement of unequal peoples all at last subject to hunger, despair, a common death.