Robert  Bly

December 23, 1926 — November 21, 2021

                A man and a woman sit near each other, 

                and they do not long at this moment to be older, or younger, 

                nor born in any other nation, or time, or place. 

                They are content to be where they are, talking or not-talking. 

                Their breaths together feed someone whom we do not know. 

                The man sees the way his fingers move; 

                he sees her hands close around a book she hands to him. 

                They obey a third body that they share in common. 

                They have made a promise to love that body. 

                Age may come, parting may come, death will come. 

                A man and a woman sit near each other; 

                as they breathe they feed someone we do not know, 

                someone we know of, whom we have never seen.

                My friend, this body is made of energy compacted and whirling.

                It is the wind that carries the henhouse down the road dancing,

                and an instant later lifts all four walls apart.

                It is the horny thumbnail of the retired railway baron,

                over which his children skate on Sunday;

                and the forhead bone which does not rot,

                the woman priest’s hair still fresh among Shang ritual things …

                We love this body as we love the day we first met the person

                who led us away from this world;

                as we love the gift we gave one morning on impulse,

                in a fraction of a second,

                that we still see every day;

                as we love the human face, fresh after love-making,

                more full of joy than a wagonload of hay.

                Inside us there is a listener who listens for what we say,

                a watcher who watches what we do.

                Each step we take in conversation with friends, 

                moving slowly, or flying among worlds, 

                he watches,

                calling us into what is possible, into what is not said,

                into the shuckheap of ruined arrowheads,

                or the old man with missing fingers.

                We wake, stretch, stand up, speak our first sentence,

                and fall as we talk into a hole in the sounds we make.

                Overly sane afternoons in a room in our twenties

                come back to us as a son who is mad.

                Every longing another had that we failed to see 

                returns to us as a squinting of the eyes when we talk,

                and no sentimentality, only the ruthless body performing its magic,

                transforming each of our confrontations into energy,

                changing our scholarly labors late at night over white-haired books

                into certainty and healing power,

                and our cruelties into an old man with missing fingers.

                At breakfast we speak of people long known who've left the Path,

                and two hours later in broad daylight the car slides off the road.

                I give advice in public one day as if I were adult,

                and that night a policeman in my dream holds a gun to the head of a blindfolded girl.

                We talk of eternity and growth, and I pour more wine into my glass than into yours.

The Origin of the Praise of God

My friend, this body is made of bone and excited protozoa! And it is with my body that I love the fields. How do I know what I feel but what the body tells me? Erasmus thinking in the snow, translators of Vergil who burn up the whole room; the man in furs reading the Arabic astrologer falls off his three-legged stool in astonishment; this is the body. So beautifully carved inside, with the curves of the inner ear, and the husk so rough, kunckle-brown.

As we walk, we enter the magnetic fields of other bodies, and every smell we take in the communities of protozoa see; and a being inside us leaps up toward it, as a horse rears at the starting gate. When we come near each other, we are drawn down into the sweetest pools of slowly circling energies, slowly circling smells; and the protozoa know there are odors the shape of oranges, tornadoes, octopuses.

So the space between two people diminishes, it grows less and less, no one to weep; they merge at last. The sound that pours from the fingertips awakens clouds of cells far inside the body, and beings unknown to us start out on a pilgrimage to their Savior, to their holy place. Their holy place is a small black stone that they remember from Protozoic times, when it was rolled away from a door.

And it was after that they found their friends, who helped them to digest the hard grains of this world. The cloud of cells awakens, intensifies, swarms. The cells dance inside beams of sunlight so thin we cannot see them. To them each ray is a vast palace, with thousands of rooms. From the dance of the cells praise sentences rise to the throat of the man praying and singing alone in his room. He lets his arms climb above his head, and says: “Now do you still say you cannot choose the Road?”

I first met you when I had been alone for nine days, and now my lonely hawk body longs to be with you, whom it remembers... it knew how close we are, we would always be. There is death but also this closeness, this joy when the bee rises into the air above his hive to find the sun, to become the son, and the traveler moves through exile and loss, through murkiness and failure, to touch the earth again of his own kingdom and kiss the ground... What shall I say of this? I say, praise to the first man who wrote down this joy clearly, for we cannot remain in love with what we cannot name.