I'll never forgive myself for the

violence propelled me at sad Paul

Blackburn, pushed in turn by both

our hopeless wives who were spitting

venom at one another in the heaven

we'd got ourselves to, Mallorca, mid-fifties,

where one could live for peanuts while

writing great works and looking at the

constant blue sea, etc. Why did I fight such

surrogate battles of existence with such

a specific friend as he was for sure?

Our first meeting NYC 1950 we talked two

and a half days straight without leaving the

apartment. He knew Auden and Yeats

by heart and had begun on Pound's lead

translating the Proven~al poets, and was

studying with Moses Hadas at NYU. How

sweet this thoughtful beleaguered vulnerable

person whose childhood was full of New

England abusive confusion, his mother the too

often absent poet, Frances Frost! I wish

he were here now, we could go on talking,

I'd have company of my own age in this

drab burned out trashed dump we call the

phenomenal world where he once walked

the wondrous earth and knew its pleasures.

from The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley 1976 - 1995, copyright 2006.
Used by permission of the Estate of Robert Creeley, and University of California Press.