Ode To Robert Bly

As hostages ate Polow in Tehran I listened in a small room in Sausalito among beaded skirts, patchouli oil and fading peace signs

Music boiling under water words cut from men dead re-animated with the plucked strings of a flat wooden dulcimer

Like a prized swordfish he caught Rilke’s words iridescent and fighting he gutted and cleaned, held them out undeniably “my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.”

Always in salty fog shifting past windows sea mammals and beaches, particularly

The Dead Seal Near McClure’s Beach

he feels “as if a wall of my room had fallen away.” Geoducks grew large, priapic through displaced sand large enough for soup boiled over in Los Angeles for video secrets and renegade sheriffs Surfacing again, a far-off periscope clanging drums and moving men up mountains harnessing wild men back, banging them into shape like so many harriers, fitting the shoe tight Now the girls are better off plucking the strings of the lute while lapping the loins of Neruda and Lorca as they whisper their delight into their hands alone