Things to Think

Think in ways you've never thought before
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you've ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he's carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you've never seen.

When someone knocks on the door, think that he's about
To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven,
Or that it's not necessary to work all the time, or that it's
Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

- Robert Bly

Every breath taken in by the man

who loves, and the woman who loves,

goes to fill the water tank

where the spirit horses drink.

- Robert Bly

One Source of Bad Information

There's a boy in you about three
Years old who hasn't learned a thing for thirty
Thousand years. Sometimes it's a girl.

This child had to make up its mind
How to save you from death. He said things like:
"Stay home. Avoid elevators. Eat only elk."

You live with this child, but you don't know it.
You're in the office, yes, but live with this boy
At night. He's uninformed, but he does want

To save your life. And he has. Because of this boy
You survived a lot. He's got six big ideas.
Five don't work. Right now he's repeating them to you

 - Robert Bly
From Morning Poems

Bad People

A man told me once that all the bad people
Were needed. Maybe not all, but your fingernails
You need; they are really claws, and we know
Claws. The sharks--what about them?
They make other fish swim faster. The hard-faced men
In black coats who chase you for hours
In dreams--that's the only way to get you
To the shore. Sometimes those hard women
Who abandon you get you to say, "You."
A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed.
It doesn't move on its own. It takes sometimes
A lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving.
Then they blow across three or four States.
This man told me that things work together.
Bad handwriting sometimes leads to new ideas;
And a careless God--who refuses to let you
Eat from the Tree of Knowledge--can lead
To books, and eventually to us. We write
Poems with lies in them, but they help a little.

- Robert Bly

Thoughts

There’s something dangerous
In being with good talkers.

The fly’s stories of his ancestors
Don’t mean much to the frog

I can't be the noisy person I am I
If you don't stop talking.

Some people talk so brilliantly
that we get small and vanish.

The shadows near that Dutch woman
Tell you that Rembrandt is a good listener.

- Robert Bly
from Morning Poems