Bly, Robert

United States, (b. 1926)

The Prodigal Son

The Prodigal Son is kneeling in the husks.
He remembers the man about to die
who cried, “Don’t let me die, Doctor!”
The swine go on feeding in the sunlight.
When he folds his hands, his knees on corncobs,
he sees the smoke of ships
floating off the isles of Tyre and Sidon,
and father beyond father beyond father.
An old man once, being dragged across the floor
by his shouting son, cried:
“Don’t drag me any farther than that crack on the floor—
I only dragged my father that far!”
My father is seventy five years old.
How difficult it is,
bending the head, looking into the water.
Under the water there’s a door the pigs have gone through.

Editor’s Note:
In the book Robert Bly, an Introduction to the Poetry by Howard Nelson, we are told the original final line above was: “What we cannot solve is expressed by the swine.” when the poem was first published. Later, Bly changed this line to: “Under the water there’s a door the pigs have gone through.” Nelson gives a thorough analysis of the likely thought process of Bly in making that change, as well as a thorough analysis of this poem and many others. You can find Nelson’s book here. Or you can read an excerpt courtesy of Google Books here.

What the Animals Paid

The Hampshire ewes standing in their wooden pens,
Their shiny black hooves close to each other,
Had to pay with their wool, with their wombs,
With their eating, with their fear of the dogs.
Every animal had to pay. Horses paid all day;
They pulled stone-boats and the ground pulled back.
And the pigs? They paid with their squealing
When the knife entered the throat and the blood
Followed it out. The blood, steaming and personal,
Paid it. Any debt left over the intestines paid.
“I am what I am.” The pig could not say that.
The women paid with their bowed heads, and the men,
My father among them, paid with their drinking.
Demons shouted: “Pay to the last drop!” I paid
The debt another way. Because I did not pay
In the farm way, I am writing this poem today.

A man and a woman and a blackbird

A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
— Wallace Stephens

When the two rivers
Join in the cloudy chamber,
So many alien nights
In our twenties, alone
On interior mountains,
Forgotten. Blackbirds
Walk around our feet
As if they shared
In what we know.
We know and we don’t know
What the heron feels
With his wing-
Tip feathers stretched
Out in the air above
The flooded lake,
Or the truffled constellations
The pig sees
Past his wild snout.
A man and a woman
Sit near each other. On
The windowpane
Ice.
The man says: “How
Is it
I have never loved
Ice before?
If I have not loved ice,
What have I loved?
Loved the dead
In their Sumerian
Fish-cloaks?
The vultures celebrating?
The soldiers
And the poor?”
And yet
For one or two
Moments,
In our shared grief
And exile,
We hang our harps
On the willows,
And the willows
Join us,
And the man
And the woman
And the blackbird are one.

About the Poet:

Robert Elwood Bly (b. 1926) is a US poet, essayist, editor, translator and activist. Bly’s work is based on the natural world, the visionary, and the realm of the irrational. He celebrates the power of poetic, mythological, and fairy tale traditions as well as Indian ecstatic poetry, meditation, and storytelling. He won the 1968 National Book Award for Poetry for his book The Light Around the Body. [DES-10/21]

Additional information:

At https://robertbly.com/ readers can increase their understanding and enjoyment of Bly’s work and find information on every facet of Robert Bly’s literary career.
Robert Bly at the Poetry Foundation
Robert Bly at WorldCat

The Prodigal Son

What the Animals Paid

A man and a woman and a blackbird A man and a woman Are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird Are one. — Wallace Stephens

About the Poet:

Additional information:

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A man and a woman and a blackbird

A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
— Wallace Stephens