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By Robert Creeley

All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.
 
What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it
 
that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me
 
something other than this,
something not so insistent—
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.
 
Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out
 
of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.


Republished by permission of the University of California Press, from Selected Poems of Robert Creeley by Robert Creeley, copyright © 1991; permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. 

Source: Selected Poems of Robert Creeley (University of California Press, 1991)

  • Living
  • Love
  • Nature

Poet Bio

Robert Creeley
Before he was five, Robert Creeley had lost the use of an eye in a freak accident and his father to a heart attack; not surprisingly, his poetry conveys an acute sense of the body’s frailty and the anguish of isolation, yet it also records the joys of love and family life. His verse is instantly recognizable—brief in its individual lines and overall length, and often so terse as to be opaque—while concerned to trace the puzzlements of the mind and heart as they move through experiences of intense intimacy. Much influenced by jazz musicians and action painters, Creeley stressed the process of writing over any finished product. See More By This Poet

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