The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

For the Greeks, who had no word for irreversible death, one did
not die, one darkened.
—Mark Strand

Where the Japanese iris right
now stand ready to
accept the inevitable
purple blossom

she found four dead mice
in their nest of dirt and dusty fur
all with their small ears pointed like pilgrims
toward the trunk of the huge cottonwood.

We piled off the bus—field trip!—
my teacher saying, suggestive and disinterested, “Just look.”
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts free and full of kids,
Chinese jades, gods and goddesses from everywhere,
room after room of very old faces looking back at us.
And here this one naked man
so tall and alone in his own room,
“The Spearthrower” though he’d lost his spear long ago
along with the hand that held it. Such a serious look

As I mentioned before, my 166 piece photo library from the national automotive museum in Alsace is unweildly for online use. I focused mainly on potrait shooting of the most amazing vehicles on the planet--like this very early racing Bugatti from the 1920s.

I'd show you some photos of the Royale (the rarest and most expensive car in the world) but the lighting was terrible--at least for my phone camera. But heck, I consider the "tank" shot above pretty good for a phone camera. And I've never minded titilation.

 

Your wife had left you post-diagnosis

yet here you were this night stumbling on fire

with dance and blood,

a retired high school Spanish teacher,

now learning the new syntax

of multiple sclerosis.

It burned from your hands and feet,

the castanets, the dark mole

on the flamenco dancer's cheek,

All the broken stomping, clapping,

duende of dark.

 

We stumbled into the lighted lobby

where you grabbed my friend and me,

To lose an oak
is no heartbreak.
—No,
but to see them go
by the acre,
at a stroke,
is enough to
crack a man open,
the heart not broken
so much as stricken,
torqued at the root
and left in a thick
choke of ache.
Just so,
a whole forest's
felling will take
faith's poorest
dwelling down and
leave the chimney—
stark
in an open space
—like a brick
marker indicating
a once good place.

 

 

I'll be honest with you, I don't know what a dream is anymore. I got a lot of shit kicked out of me.

Have you somehow made your peace with this world? I'm curious: without getting all religious or flaky on me, can you tell me how you did that?

 

 

 

I have seen the sun break through

 

to illuminate a small field

for a while, and gone my way

and forgotten it. But that was the pearl

of great price, the one field that had

treasure in it. I realize now

that I must give all that I have

to possess it. Life is not hurrying

Selected Poems, 1986
A “best of” anthology of a kind, these are really good poems—and the mixture of work sheds light on Bly’s stylistic and topical meanderings. You’ll find “Counting Small Boned Bodies” and other lamentations on Vietnam, as well as more than a hundred examples from three decades of work. The prose poems from This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood (1977) are beautiful and show off Bly’s command of the unwieldy form.

Sleepers Joining Hands, 1973

“We have to speak up about this war. Now we don’t even count the bodies. We only count the American bodies. Woo-hoo. That’s even more self-obsessed. We kill hundreds and hundreds of Iraqis, and we don’t pay any attention to how many there are. We don’t call up the hospitals; we don’t call up the morgues. Let’s count the Iraqi bodies over again. Maybe we can bring them over to this country. Prop them up at some of Bush’s speeches, so we know what the money is going for. Americans want their money’s worth.

In his seventy-seven years, he has established himself as a world-class poet, teacher, social critic—and founder of the controversial “expressive men’s movement.”


Standing in his studio—a nineteenth-century stable behind what was once a lone farmhouse atop Lowry Hill—Robert Bly is surrounded by books, papers, and icons. This is a monk’s cell. In one nook stands a simple bed. There is a prayer room, where gatherings of chanting and drumming are held for a regular group of initiates who sit cross-legged on Persian carpets.