Following the couple of recent posts on the great American poet, Robert Creeley – here and here, here’s Creeley’s poem/elegy for Allen – “When I Heard The Learn’d Astronomer…” (from his 2003 volume, If I Were Writing This)
“WHEN I HEARD THE LEARN’D ASTRONOMER…”
A bitter twitter,
flitter,
of birds,
in evening’s
settling,
a reckoning,
beckoning
someone’s getting
some sad news,
the birds gone to nest,
to roost
in the darkness,
asking no improvident questions,
none singing,
no hark,
no lark,
nothing in the quiet dark.
Begun with like hypothesis,
arms, head, shoulders.
with body state
better soon than late,
better not wait,
better not be late,
breathe ease,
fall to knees,
in posture of compliance,
obeisance,
accommodation
a motivation.
All systems must be imagination
which works,
allbeit have quirks.
Add by the one
or by the none,
make it by either
or or.
Or say that after you
I go
follow me
See what comes after
or before,
what
you had thought.
Many’s a twenty?
A three?
Is twenty-three
plenty?
A call to reason
then
in due season
a proposal of heaven
at seven
in the evening,
a cup of tea, a sense
of recompense
for anyone works for a living,
getting and giving.
Does it seem mind’s all?
What’s it mean
to be inside
a circle, to fly
in the sky, dear bird?
Words scattered,
tattered
yet
said
make it
all evident,
manifest.
No contest.
One’s one again.
It’s done.
Hurry on, friend,
There is no end
to desire
to Blake’s fire
to Beckett’s mire,
to any such whatever.
Old friend’s dead
in bed.
Old friend’s die,
Goodbye!
Creeley can be heard reading the poem here – “… the sad occasion, the, effectually, the poem in memory of Allen Ginsberg, for which I used, actually, a title of Walt Whitman‘s called “When I Heard The Learn’d Astronomer”, which is, in itself a wonderful poem, a poem about sitting and listening to a lecturer, who is well-informed and obviously saying things of real import, but the listener becomes restless, the man is talking about the heavens and astronomy, and the man listening becomes restless ,and goes outside and looks at the sky, the heavens – and that’s sort of parallel to my sense of what Allen was doing.”
awesome