Listening
with the Heart: Parables of Love and Longing
Marjorie Buettner
Minnesota, US
A review of:
The Night
Abraham Called To The Stars by Robert Bly, (HarperCollins
Publishers), 2001, 95 pages, $23.
I was first introduced to the
ghazal form (a 1,000 year old Middle-Eastern love poem) after reading Adrienne
Rich's poem "Homage to Ghalib." Admittedly, her ghazals (as well as
some of Bly's) are a modified version of the form which traditionally consists
of mono-rhymed couplets (aa/ba/ca/da.). These couplets are thematically
independent from one another and have a wide range of references and
associations. Bly, however, uses a three-line stanza in order to utilize the
natural flow of syllabic count. (See a collection of articles in Lynx for an
in-depth analysis of the ghazal form: http://www.ahapoetry.com
and also an interview with Bly about this form: http://www.robertbly.com/int_10.html)
The Night Abraham Called To The Stars by Robert Bly draws from the form's
wellspring of transformative energy. These poems (only 48 in number) are
miniature portraits of life's ambiguities and contradictions. As Bly has said in
an MPR interview, this collection can only be understood by addressing
"some of our griefs" that have accumulated in our individual and
collective psyches. It is our shadow-self ruined by endless greed for war, for
material possessions, for an inconstant heart colored by faithlessness and
unbelief. These griefs are symptomatic of our shared culpability, our shared
humanness. There is little that can save us from ourselves, we humans bent on
self-destruction (on a global and personal scale). The poet as prophet or seer
leads us step by step into the darkness (just as Virgil led Dante into hell) so
that he may illuminate our way in order to show us where we have gone astray.
The ghazal as a fluid form touches
upon these many ambiguous contradictions that dominate our nature. Bly
successfully and gracefully moves back and forth between light and dark, joy and
sorrow, sin and redemption, life and death, all in a swell of 6-8 stanzas
many of which remind me of the transcendental quality of haiku or the secret
power of a parable revealing the depths of our strengths and weaknesses, our
blessings and our shame, our love and longing.
For Bly the ghazal--since each
stanza holds an independent theme which changes constantly--is a perfect form to
utilize his vast and diverse interests in philosophy, art, religion and poetry.
"The Night Abraham Called to the Stars" is a sympathetic yet critical
portrait of Abraham who believed the stars were divine and who made the all too
human mistake of believing that when the stars set so too did his God:
Do you remember the night Abraham first called
To the stars? He cried to Saturn: "You are my Lord!"
How happy he was! When he saw the Dawn Star.
He cried, "You are my Lord!" How destroyed he was
When he watched them set. Friends, he is like us:
We take as our Lord the stars that go down.
This is a perfect metaphor for our inability to rely upon unseen faith; we bury
ourselves in our unbelief like a badger in a hole loving to feel "The dirt
flying out from behind our hind claws." It is the poet who reminds us that
even though our shoes are caked with the mud of our fallible existence, we need
the stars--even if their absence (like the absence of a lost love or a dead
father) is the only thing felt. The poet is familiar with this grief and calls
into the night "like an abandoned woman" to that which seems, so
many times in our life, lost to us:
My heart is a calm potato by day, and a weeping,
Abandoned woman by night. Friend, tell me what to do,
Since I am a man in love with the setting stars.
Often in these poems Bly calls the reader "friend" reminding us of the
poetic influence and spiritual inheritance of Rumi. It is Rumi, too, who tells
us: "spindrift along the beach--wanting, wanting." It is our desires
and wants that bind us, imprison us; and, as Rumi suggests, they are all
ultimately illusory. Bly tells us that our greed may cause us to lose more than
our lives. In "The Wagon and the Cliff" greed becomes a propelling
agent which sends wagons over cliffs, makes boys die alone, pushes birds out of
nests and lets the "smoke of sadness" swirl from each line to enter
the reader's heart:
Because I've become accustomed to failure,
Some smoke of sadness blows off these poems.
These poems are windows blown open by winter wind.
So, The Night Abraham Called To The Stars is not a light-hearted or optimistic
collection of poems but in this time of grief it is a necessary one. Again and
again, Bly's poems remind us how we have fallen from grace and the fall is
continuous and long into the darkness propelled by these uncontrollable desires
called "the Lord of Greed." It is, however, the miracle of grace in
"The Eel in the Cave" which may, upon occasion, save us, redeem us:
Our veins are open to shadow, and our fingertips
Porous to murder. It's only the inattention
Of the prosecutors that lets us go to lunch.
Even in the dark, someone is hitching the horses.
That doesn't mean I have done things well.
I have found so many ways to disgrace
Myself, and throw a dark cloth over my head.
And, yet, even as we live day by day in guilt and disgrace, we are saved, again
and again, by "invisible angels" who "work to keep / Us from
drowning; so many hands reach / Down to pull the swimmer from the water."
Ultimately, the poet admits that "Even though the District Attorney keeps
me / Well in mind, grace allows me sometimes / To slip into the Alhambra by
night." Though we do not deserve it, the poet admits, we are allowed, by
grace alone, to enter the "Alhambra by night." Though I have never
been there, the sighing-breath sound of "Alhambra" makes me think,
after all, there is Paradise after death.
The mystery of Bly's poetry resides in the imaginative, almost surrealistic
leaps they make. The ghazal becomes a perfect springboard for Bly's imagination
since each stanza changes from topic to topic. I will give you "The
Dead of Shiloh" in full to illustrate the beauty of the form's construction
as well as the expertise of Bly's writing:
"A drowsy numbness pains my sense." Keats heard
The nightingale cry out from the place of war.
He heard the thud of the buffalo-killer's gun.
The slant soul loves to play cards in the serpent's house.
The crow arrived only yesterday on Noah's boat
With the mud of Abraham's earth between his toes.
Shiloh was like a drug that hid secretly
Among the rough leaves on the Natchez Trace.
All the drinkers wanted it, and fell asleep.
We value addition and subtraction too much.
Ten thousand Newtons wrapping their equations
Around the serpent's tail can't replace a single lover.
The sunfish flashes light to the reeds below.
Moonlight slips inside the oyster's closed eyes.
The Light of Heaven widens the frog's mouth.
We float in the shadows below the dock.
But a dark hook hangs farther down.
There is nothing on that hook but "Farewell."
Here Newton (symbolic of the "Age of Reason") becomes an equation of
death that this 20th century nuclear age promulgates. And, if we continue in
this unreasonable and unredeemable "Age of Reason" ignoring the wisdom
of nature ( the sunfish, oysters and frogs), then we are doomed to "float
in the shadow below the dock" like a scavenger fish bristled with
lake-bottom dust, while the "dark hook" of death holds nothing but
"Farewell." What a wonderful poem this is.
Sometimes Bly's ethics come to the fore of an individual poem showing us, like
Blake's cosmology of an innocence-lost world, how we have lost our way and how
we may, if we pay attention, find it again. In "The Country Roads" the
poet argues for the integrity of a country road:
"So many times this week I've
felt like weeping. / It's natural, like the cry of Canada Geese / Who call to
each other over the darkening reeds // In my early poems I praised so many lost
things. / The way the crickets' cries in October carried / Them into the night
sky felt right to me. // Every way of knowing is blessed by bootleggers. /
Because the government does not allow delight / To be sold, you have to find it
on the country roads."
Bly "In Praise of Scholars" once again gives us a metaphor that goes
beyond the symbolic into parable; how can we save our mortgaged souls, he asks;
perhaps it is up to the scholars and poets to lead us out of debt into a solvent
existence.
Furry shadows are bringing
gifts to our door.
We have nowhere to live but with the moles.
We'll have to pay the mortgage on the house of sorrow.
Our house is roofed with the shingles of parting.
Children there slide off their mothers' knees;
The door leads inward to silent wives and husbands.
My father wrote numbers down all his life
With a short, blunt pencil. Even Aristotle
Found himself caught in his dark reason.
It's too late to move now, friends. We'll have to pay
For year--yes!--and the interest rate is fixed.
It will require our lives, as it did our parents'.
Hundreds of scholars work in the basement.
They are good students of the ten thousand things.
Without them we would be at war forever.
There is only one mortgage and so many forms of payment!
There is one peace and so many forms of war.
The furry shadows are bringing gifts to the door.
Though we know the world turns through partings and we live on in the
"house of sorrow," perhaps each reader must listen with his or her
heart in order to find the answers graciously given by this remarkable poet; and
if we listen with our hearts those answers become priceless.
Marjorie Buettner
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