Poem of the Day: Robert Creeley

by | Nov 5, 2015 | Poem of the Day Series, Reading

 

EDGES

 

Edges of the field, the blue flowers, the reddish wash of
the grasses, the cut green path up to the garden
plot overgrown with seedlings and weeds—

green first of all, but light, the cut of the sunlight
edges each shift of the vivid particulars, grown large
—even the stones large in their givens, the shadows massing

their bulk, and so seeing I could follow out to another
edge of the farther field, where trees are thick on the sky’s
edge, thinking I am not simply a response to this, this light,

not just an agency sees and vaguely adumbrates, adds an opinion.
There is no opinion for life, no word more or less general.
I had begun and returned, again and again, to find you finally,

felt it all gather, as here, to be a place again, and wanted to
shuck the husk of habits, to lift myself to you in this sunlight.
If it is age, then what does age matter? If it is older or younger,

what moment notes it? In this containment there cannot
be another place or time. It all lives by its being
here and now, this persistent pleasure, ache of promise, misery of all that’s lost.

Now as if this moment had somehow secured to itself a body,
had become you, just here and now, the wonders inseparable
in this sunlight, here, had come to me again.

 

—from The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley: 1975-2005, University of California Press (2006)