286
I am not going farther from you,
I am coming nearer,
green rain carries me nearer you,
I weave drunkenly about the page,
I love you,
I never knew that I loved you
until I was swallowed by the invisible,
PARTISAN REVIEW
my black shoes evaporating, rising about my head...
("The Night Journey")
Bly's insistence is proof of his failure: these lines require translation
into "I
hope
1 am not going farther.. ..1
want
to
come nearer. ... 1
want
to
love you." And these translations reduce to "I want to establish
community." But can a writer establish community with his readers
through a passage like the following?
All those men who cannot find the road,
who die coughing particles of black flesh onto
neighboring roofs.
Nailheads that have been brooding on Burton's
Melancholy
under Baltimore rowhouses
roll out in the street, underneath tires,
and catch the Secretary of State
as he goes off to threaten the premiers of
underdeveloped nations.
("Hair")
What exists here of a kind of prose statement is available
to
the
community (the Secretary of State is an evil man); what exists as poetry
is virtually unintelligible because of its privacy of meaning.
How difficult it must be to cultivate this special brand of solitary
sensibility ("inwardness, inwardness, inwardness, / the inward path 1
still walk on") and still hope for the kind of reader community Ely
writes about, in this book but especially in his criticism. He's accom–
plished this job in the past, it's true-by shunting between inner and
outer worlds, writing "private" poems of quiet, mystical meditation on
the one hand and "public" poems of scathing political and psychologi–
cal analysis on the other.
Sleepers]oining Hands
is an attempt to come
to
terms with the inner/ outer dichotomy, to integrate them or at least
to lead them toward integration. But the attempt mostly fails,
~ince
the
self Bly would integrate is so admittedly disintegrated:
