Nesting

Robert Creeley’s poetry often veered into the darknesses of intimacy. The tangled ironies of relationship nested, like Creeley's phrases, one within another . . . 

RC: I was thinking, for example, of a phrase like Bob Dylan’s, “There must be some way out of here, said the joker to the thief.” That insistent situation within, say, my own writing or the writing of others that I’ve been moved by, the attempt, so insistently singular, of finding a way out of the oppression of—-not so much of the limiting social enclosures, that one wants to leave a small town—-but far more the kind of enclosure obvious in Crime and Punishment or Kafka’s The Trial or situations that are basically paranoid, where one feels like the only one in the universe who’s out of step or out of sync or can’t find the way through to the other side.

BC: As one so easily feels in an English Department.

RC: Well, welcome to the bleak fact of company. The irony of our social group is that so often everyone feels this, but there’s no company whatsoever in that feeling.

I remember once being told by an outstanding landscape architect, Dan Kiley.

He’d found himself at the edge of Lake Champlain, in the middle of the winter—-very cold and desolate place—-he just was absolutely captivated by this lake.

Lo and behold, this particular day as he was standing, probably in a blizzard, looking out over the waste, there was another figure, a person, just ten or twenty feet away from him, who proved to be this woman, and his conjecture was that anyone so drawn to such a place must have an emotional affinity with him that was deeply rooted. And that was the basis for their relation! 

The woman married him.

Well, it sounds true, one of the great stories, but you know in retrospect it sounds like a pretty hard way to meet people you care about! When you’re both so curiously isolated that you find company in being the only two in that universe together.

Air: "The Love of a Woman"

The love of a woman
is the possibility which
surrounds her as hair
her head, as the love of her

follows and describes
her. But what if
they die, then there is
still the aura

left, left sadly, but
hovers in the air, surely,
where this had taken place?
Then sing, of her, of whom

it will be said, he
sang of her, it was the
song he made which made her
happy, so she lived. 

~ RC