Free Airmail by Robert Bly

half-dark.
    Around me the ground is clean with needles fallen so far.
    I sit on a stump, content near great things.
    Here the darkness can rest, here it can stretch and sleep.
    I see a man stabbed, smelling
    Laurel, leaning against an old tree.
    My blood spurts out over the shaggy bark and pine brush.
    I am dying! My eyes close
    Without rancour on leaves. It is all right,
    My blood will go to a great hollow under the earth.
Looking Up at the Waterfall in Lofthus, Hardanger
    How wonderful to look up and see water falling
    Here it seems to come over the edge of the sky
    And then drops to a lap, and then the long plunge
    after the slanting blow off the cliff
    A deep plunge, loveless,
    floating,
    it falls by the cliff
    like tufts of sleep
    The sleep that overcomes the truck driver after having driven from the coast
    The gestures in an animal’s eyes when he dies in a room with human beings
    Like the glimpses the meditator has of something floating under the water, neither moving nor not moving,
    Seeming to slow as it nears the bottom.
    10 April ’66
    Dear Tomas,
    You’re getting to be a slow letter writer again! I’m busy, with Galway Kinnell, organizing anti-government readings. We’ll have a large rally in Chicago this Saturday for a thousand people or more. The Buddhists are trying desperately to kick us out of Vietnam—I hope to God they succeed.
    We are printing up the contents of a typical read-in as a booklet to be called A Poetry Reading Against the Vietnam War. It will be out May 3rd. I’ll send you a copy.
    I’m getting ready to publish soon Three Swedish Poets also—it will be 7–10 poems apiece of Martinson, Ekelöf, and Herr Across-the-River. The royalty on such a Sixties book is $150 usually, so I’m dividing it up to the three of you; $50 apiece as permissions fee. I hope that will be all right. Check enclosed here.
    Jim Wright called a couple of days ago—he has been on a Guggenheim grant living in N.Y.—but has got a job for next year teaching at Hunter College, and was happy about that—he’ll be able to stay in New York, to which he has taken an enormous liking. He’ll never get to Europe at all this year. He said he had written a poem that day, and chortled happily.
    Harpers has decided to publish my new book, after fierce fighting between the old and new guards there. Don Hall sent a postcard that arrived yesterday to tell me. I was gone all day, poking about at a lake nearby, and so Carol read the card. So, to tell me then, she put a up huge sign in the driveway, that said: DRIVE SLOWLY! HARPERS’ AUTHOR LIVES HERE. That was sweet.
    My best to Monica & to you—
    Affectionately,
    Robert
    10-4-66
    Dear Robert,
    The other day we got a Christmas present from you! A very beautiful Joan Baez record—she’s often running through my head. It made us very happy. Otherwise I mostly play Brahms, myself, on the piano. It affords a certain comfort, the rolling resigned and bearded progressions one is able to squeeze out of the instrument. It’s Truth, my lad, truth, nothing helps right now but that. In Saigon, Da Nang and Hue the truth is being written right now in such large letters that it ought to force itself on the attention even of the blinded masses that nourish themselves on Time magazine. It was fine to read that you and others are doing your best in Oregon and elsewhere. I hope you have no objections to BLM running a notice about it—I met Lars Gustafsson the other day and he had also gotten a photostat from the N.Y. Times. Powerful poems!
    Here is a first draft of the 3 presidents. A few uncertainties: does Roosevelt want to be a stone that rushes around at night, in which case he goes at a fairly violent speed, or does he only want to walk around at an ordinary walking pace. (I imagine him, huddled, concentrated, moving as fast as a hunted bear.) And Kennedy: the air invisible, resilient [osynlig, stärkande], that’s something I’ll probably change. Air is always invisible anyway. Were