Robert Creeley

Poet Robert Creeley died this morning at the age of 78. As William Matthews said in his eulogy of W.H Auden:

The language has used him
well and passed him through.
We get what he has collected.

Creeley published the following poem in 1996, in Andrei Codrescu's journal, The Exquisite Corpse.

Goodbye

Now I recognize
it was always me
like a camera
set to expose

itself to a picture
or a pipe
through which the water
might run

or a chicken
dead for dinner
or a plan
inside the head

of a dead man.
Nothing so wrong
when one considered
how it all began.

It was Zukofsky's
"Born very young into a world
already very old..."
The century was well along

when I came in
and now that it's ending,
I realize it won't
be long.

But couldn't it all have been
a little nicer,
as my mother'd say. Did it
have to kill everything in sight,

did right always have to be so wrong?
I know this body is impatient.
I know I constitute only a meager voice and mind.
Yet I loved, I love.

I want no sentimentality.
I want no more than home.