Robert Bly

 

Where I awake, I hear the sheep eating apple peels

Just outside the screen. The trees are heavy soaked, cold and hushed.

The sun just rising. All seems calm and yet something here is not calm.

We live in wooden buildings made of two by fours making the landscape nervous

for hundreds of miles.

And the emperor when he was sixty called for rhinoceros horn, for sky blue

phoenix eggs shaped from veined rock, dipped in rooster blood, around him

the wasps kept guard, the hens continued their patrol, the oysters open and

close all questions.

The heat inside the human body grows, it does not know where to throw

itself - for a while it knots into will, heavy burning sweet, then into

generosity that longs to take on the burdens of others, then into mad love
that lasts forever.

The artist walks swiftly to his studio & carves oceanic waves

Into the dragon's mane.