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’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 meagre voice and mind,
Yet I loved, I love.

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

ROBERT CREELEY, a great friend of CounterPunch and one of our favorite poets, died this week. This poem is from his wonderful book Life & Death.