Excerpt from 'Just in Time: Poems 1984-1994'

Just in Time

Poems 1984-1994

By Robert Creeley

A New Directions Book

Preface: Conversations with Charles Bernstein........................1
Memory Gardens......................................................33
Windows.............................................................91
Echoes.............................................................205
Index..............................................................295
Acknowledgments....................................................305

Chapter One

HEAVEN KNOWS

Seemingly never until one's dead
is there possible measure—

but of what then or for what
other than the same plagues

attended the living with misunderstanding
and wanted a compromise as pledge

one could care for any of them
heaven knows, if that's where one goes.

FORTY

The forthright, good-natured faith
of man hung on crane up

forty stories with roof scaffolding
burning below him forty feet,

good warm face, black hair,
confidence. He said, when

the firemen appeared, he said
I'm glad to see you,

glad not to be there alone.
How old? Thirty, thirty-five?

He has friends to believe in,
those who love him.

OUT

Within pitiless
indifference
things left
out.

NEW ENGLAND

Work, Christian, work!
Love's labors before you go
carrying lights like the
stars are all out and
tonight is the night.

TOO LATE

You tried to answer the questions attractively,
your name, your particular interests,

what you hoped life would prove,
what you owned and had with you,

your so-called billfold an umbilical,
useless, to the sack you'd carried

all your sad life, all your vulnerability,
but couldn't hide, couldn't now say,

brown hair, brown eyes, steady,
I think I love you.

ROOM

Quick stutters of incidental
passage going back

and forth, quick
breaks of pattern, slices

of the meat, two
rotten tomatoes, an incidental

snowstorm, death, a girl
that looks like you later

than these leaves of
grass, trees, birds, under

water, empty passageway,
and no way back.

HOTEL

It isn't in the world of
fragile relationships

or memories, nothing
you could have brought with you.

It's snowing in Toronto.
It's four-thirty, a winter evening,

and the tv looks like a faded
hailstorm. The people

you know are down the hall,
maybe, but you're tired,

you're alone, and that's happy.
Give up and lie down.

ECHO

Pushing out from
this insistent

time makes
all of it

empty, again
memory.

EARTH

And as the world is flat or round
out over those difficult dispositions

of actual water, actual earth,
each thing invariable, specific,

I think no rock's hardness,
call on none to gainsay me,

be only here as and forever
each and every thing is.