National Poetry Month: Robert Creeley

"Help"

Robert Creeley

Who said you didn't want

to keep what you got

and would help the other guy

share the bulging pot

of goodies you got

just by being bought

on time by the plot

wouldn't give you a dime

sick or not

you've got to stay well

if you want to buy time

for a piece of the lot

where you all can hang out

when you aren't sick in bed

blood running out

bones broken down

eyes going blind

ears stuffed up

stomach a bloat

you battered old goat

but nothing to keep up

no payments to make

no insurance is fine

when you plan to die

when you don't mind the wait

if you can't stand up

and all the others are busy

still making money

"Help" appeared in the collection Life & Death by Robert Creeley (New Directions, 1998). Creeley died March 30, 2005. From the 1998 review by Tom Clark, SF Gate: For the poet now starting his eighth decade, what could be more natural than to find the foremost of those ties in the inexorably approaching fact of closure? Death in these poems is not simply a "subject,/ or a place / in time," but an ever-encroaching presence, hauntingly pervasive. Physical decline in the poems of "Life & Death" is unswervingly confronted. Tonally, such ruminations sometimes waver riskily between stoic wit and simple self-pity. How does one bid adieu without seeming maudlin? What finally saves these poems from the potential bathos of their grimly obsessive subject matter is an unflinching honesty, exercised at the expense of a gallant self-image; that honesty earns important rewards of reader trust. Even at their most insistently morbid, the poems win us over by reminding us how much of what they reveal about the author's condition is, like it or not, ours to share.