Poetry Monday: People Like Us

 

People Like Us

 for James Wright 

There are more like us. All over the world

 There are confused people, who can’t remember

 The name of their dog when they wake up, and people

 Who love God but can’t remember where

 He was when they went to sleep. It’s

 All right. The world cleanses itself this way.

 A wrong number occurs to you in the middle

 Of the night, you dial it, it rings just in time 

To save the house. And the second-story man

 Gets the wrong address, where the insomniac lives,

 And he’s lonely, and they talk, and the thief

 Goes back to college. Even in graduate school,

 You can wander into the wrong classroom,

 And hear great poems lovingly spoken

 By the wrong professor. And you find your soul,

 And greatness has a defender, and even in death you’re safe.

Robert Bly

 Bly published this in 2013 when he was 87, and dedicated it to his old friend James Wright, a poet who was a year younger than Bly but never got old, because he died in 1980 at the age of 53. When I saw this date again, I realized that when I heard Bly and Wright read together in Pittsburgh, it must have been in the last decade of Wright’s life. Bly had published a book on Wright in 2005. Bly gave his last public reading in 2015. His Collected Poems were published in 2019. He is 94. 

The top photo is by Henri Cartier-Bresson, French photographer of mostly urban scenes from the 1930s through the 1960s.  For awhile he was my favorite photographer, and at least in the way he frames his photos, he is again.