Robert Creeley’s Love

Robert Creeley

A Day Book

I was reminded of this poem while reading Maggie Nelson’s Bluets; a friend sent me one of her favorite excerpts from the book:

Is to be in love with blue, then, to be in love with a disturbance? Or is the love itself the disturbance? And what kind of madness is it anyway, to be in love with something constitutionally incapable of loving you back?

‘Constitutionally incapable of loving you back.’ There was something so sudden in that phrase that struck me…and after chewing on it for a while, I pinned it down to the fact that the words constitutionally and incapable should not go together – but when combined they produced a especially raw, grounding effect. Which brings us to Creeley’s poem and the similarly incongruous phrase of his of which I was reminded.

This is a short piece, and quite bare, as with much of Creeley’s work. Simple, short, and without any meaningful resolution – as the most human of sorrows are.   

The word tracking? Well it has you envisioning footprints in the snow, a white, impermeable landscape, and the feeling of solitude that accompanies the word tracking.

Change the record – ah, what an entreaty! Imagine behind haunted or actively consumed by what is internally cranking – turning down the metaphorical volume would simply diminish its reach, skipping the track would progress one to the next stage; changing the record? Why, that’s a whole new vinyl in the player.

It’s a resigned, slightly somber request – no, not quite a request, but an admission, given in a flat, bare tone. A admission of the desire to be taken out of the current photo completely and transfigured elsewhere.