Our Master, Robert Bly

Robert, you are still the teacher,
and I am forever your pupil, sitting
on a log in a sun-streaked woods
or on a hard metal chair at a formal
reading, or sprawled on a living room
carpet. Anywhere or everywhere, you raise
your baritone voice and regale us with poems.
You separate us from our usual comforts,
make us squirm and wonder, “Is he still
talking about that same subject from last year,
and the year before, or the time, remember it?
when the last glacier sliced through southern
Minnesota, and in an impromptu poem, Robert
named the three new lakes it had carved.”
But a silence greeted your latest poems
about grief as the flip side of joy. Where did
you first find grief and joy so perfectly
meshed? At your other house on the far side of
the River? Where you live with badgers, deer,
a great horned owl, unfettered horses, stray dogs,
even a lone wolf, who howls when you recite.
And what is that dark creature sunning itself
on your front porch? Robert, when will you stop
surprising us? I saw your writing tools on a table
in the Great Hall of the Poetry Building. A pen
was spilling blue ink wantonly over piles of
pure white pages, a PC was furiously revising
new poems, even an old typewriter was making
an inventory of past poems. And then I saw you,
walking swiftly through the tall grass, pausing
only long enough to write in a small notebook.
But the Book, Robert, the Book! Some say it can’t
be closed. You keep expanding it. Others say
it has burst into spontaneous life. Imagine that!
I remember meeting you over fifty years ago
at a Poets Against the War reading at St. Cloud
State University. An exchange student from Vietnam
was in the audience, and he came to the podium
and recited one of his English-language poems,
imitating your vocal inflections with pitch-perfect
intonation. It was very moving. Even five decades later,
that memory brings tears to my eyes. That brave young man,
his country ravaged by war, still trusted poetry, and he
chose you as his master. Poetry was the Joy, War the Grief,
and the two were knotted together like Fire in the Lake.