Love and frangibility: An appreciation of Robert Creeley

The motions of a readerly mind must follow all these possibilities: the leaf was still, or it was moving; "fall" was a verb, or a noun; and if a noun, a noun of time, or a noun of place. Though individual readers will experience these impressions serially-under the aegis of a "first" and a "then"-and undergo flashes of presumption and resumption around line-breaks, it remains true that the different possibilities inhere in the same place, the same words; and the overall falling thrust of the poem (from the window posed at the top, to the breaking at the bottom) has the aspect of a single gesture. Furthermore, we don't construct our ideas of the world out of world; rather we construct them out of language, and when we take the particular as something peeled away or fallen from the ideal well of all things of its kind, we are taking a leaf of instance from abstraction's endless yellow sky-pool. Even the line-break of "A leaf of/ yellow color is" draws our attention to the double genitive at work: in the one, the yellow color is simply a quality inherent in the leaf; in the other, the leaf is one small swatch from the well of all yellowness. Hard to say how large or small, how much of a THING even so apparently obvious a THING as a yellow is-even as I write the word, I sense the "ow" and "yell" of it, hints of a fracture in the voice to match the wind's ow, or the window's pane.

In this world "made" by its seer, "some man" may well (if fleetingly) appear to be only a portion of man-matter, some man-stuff, a bit of instance. "Some" comes right after "everything put/ in place," and precedes not only a line-break but a stanza break-some of the everything, thus, seems to be selected out, and some substance, some matter, seems about to be delivered to us. But as soon as the next stanza delivers its "man" walking by, we have to adjust our reading of the word "some," so that it better comports with the usual usages-"some man [whose name I don't know] walks by"-a whole, particular, but unforeknown person. Thus as readers we pass through stages of relation even to the human-taking it first for just some more material in a landscape-a few dabs of dark ochre or sienaand then for a coherent figure, distinct from (and moving over) its ground.

In these ways the poem offers almost simultaneously familiar and estranged versions of that quotidian focus, one's window's-worth of world, all framed and ready to be mistaken for complete. Of course, the window at issue in this poem ultimately becomes the human eye-breakable not only in its contract with the metaphor, since it too is a metaphor, but in its contract with the world. If the world enters the mind through the eye-if all we have of the world is subject to the aperture of aspects-and if all we have of mind's all is matter's parts, then the lines of definition (distinguishing any this from some that) are destined to be violated. To look at the outside world is to take it in. To see it is to feel it, and to feel FOR itsince one of the practical understandings of a breaking eye is of an eye spilling its liquids. The naive sensibility that could take a window's image for liftable with its frame becomes the cool eye, thinking itself separable from its head, an eye that finally cannot contain what it has taken in, what it took for "everything." And that's the point at which it becomes a most empathic eye, a crying eye, the eye that cannot tell itself from what it has observed. For the human eye cannot turn its objective gaze upon itself. Its own breaking has to be "felt," not seen.