Love and frangibility: An appreciation of Robert Creeley

We say things "all fall into place" when a coherent relation among them can be deduced, when a clue reveals the hidden story. Insofar as Creeley questions the site of such presumptions-not only the "place" but the "falling" and even the "all" itself-he questions the very grounds on which we ever make claims to "the whole truth." In this poem, the leverage of language (given which and some distance,

I can lift the world) is sometimes transparently painstaking. There are downplummetings played against bypassings, depths of field undone by sudden monocularity. The line-break after "to what" (stanza three: lift// all that, to what/ purpose?) suggests an "end" but displaces that end into the next line's "purpose"-a reminder of how physical ends (the ends of lines, as well as the ends to which things fall) may not necessarily follow intentions. Indeed in that next line's little world, the phrase "to what purpose" can seem to be synonymous with the question "why"-a match for "how," its line-mate, looking for all the world like an interrogative until the succeeding line-break shifts our understandings once again, and "how" turns to an adverb: "How/ heavy the slow// world is.... " Placed at the ends of their respective lines, "How" and "slow" look like a rhyme but aren't-another, delicate instance of Creeley's thorough-going impulse to unsettle a superficial presumption. For each line is its own little worldwindow, its own provisional wholeness, and no mere part. To the extent that at the end of a line we feel propelled toward more words, line-breaks break the hold of custom in us, break our unreflecting assumptions about the world to come.

A line-break breaks up the immediate; it mediates. It makes its medium if not visible at least unmissable (as a window is if not visible at least palpable). And look at the skillful way in which Creeley takes the material of humanity and charges it with individuality. In the course of laying out the stuff of the world (apparently a fallen, falling stuff, when everything's "put in place") he sees the flow of origins in the lay of the road, the palette of the decorator in the swatch of leaf, and some man-stuff moving next to some car-stuff. That leaf of yellow color is the turning leaf, whose appearance almost automatically occasions the thought of "fall," verb and noun at once: noun AS verb, indeed. "A leaf of/ yellow color is/ going to/ fall.... " As "fall" shimmers in our minds between noun and verb, "going to" shimmers between imminence in time, and motion in space.

Indeed, though the poem starts off sounding like a rumination on place and IN place, Creeley's (philosophical) position keeps turning to a motion. The man's walking, for example, makes us have to consider how a car can remain "beside him" unless 1) the car is moving very slowly, keeping pace, or 2) the man is seen in a stop-frame of moment. In that glimpse of static gesture he could be perceived in the posture of a walker (one foot in the air for example) and the car beside him parked-a moment's glance would take the question of motion out of the consideration of "beside." This very quandary about motion and its absence becomes a quandary about imminence versus immanence when the road is referred to as "dropped." In what sense is the road a "dropped" road? In the eye that fell to it from the level of the man and car? Or in the mind that knows roads are, in their construction, poured from trucks? At one time a hot flow, the road has become, in time, an arterial ground relying on its properties of stasis and solidity, its having cooled into place and out of flux. All this is material for (and of) thought: for thinking about thought. Because "position is where you put it" makes positioning its own object.