Early Morning in Your Room
By: Robert Bly
It's morning. The brown scoops of coffee, the wasp-like Coffee grinder, the neighbors still asleep. The gray light as you pour gleaming water-- It seems you've traveled years to get here. Finally you deserve a house. If not deserve It, have it; no one can get you out. Misery Had its way, poverty, no money at least. Or maybe it was confusion. But that's over. Now you have a room. Those lighthearted books: The Anatomy of Melancholy, Kafka's Letter to his Father, are all here. You can dance With only one leg, and see the snowflake falling With only one eye. Even the blind man Can see. That's what they say. If you had A sad childhood, so what? When Robert Burton Said he was melancholy, he meant he was home.
You can find this poem in Robert Bly’s, Stealing Sugar from the Castle: Selected Poems, 1950–2011
Bly: "I've tried in prose poems to lift the sounds up /
I call sounds such as er/in/or "sound particles."
Here's Bly's prose-poem "A Hollow Tree":
I bend over an old hollow cottonwood stump, still standing, waist
high, and look inside. Early spring. Its Siamese temple walls are all
brown and ancient. The walls have been worked on by the intricate
ones. Inside the hollow walls there is privacy and secrecy, dim light.
And yet some creature has died there.
On the temple floor feathers, gray feathers, many of them with
a fluted white tip. Many feathers. In the silence many feathers.
This is so close to home.
Thank you.