Robert Creeley died?

How can that be possible?

I just wrote yesterday to Allen Bramhall (in a comment on his post about his father’s death) that he’d helped me remember how death is both “utterly normal and utterly unimaginable.”

Here, then, one of the most beautiful poems I can think of:

If You                                                                               

 
If you were going to get a pet

what kind of animal would you get.

 
A soft bodied dog, a hen–

feathers and fur to begin it again.

 
When the sun goes down and it gets dark

I saw an animal in a park.

 
Bring it home, to give it to you.

I have seen animals break in two.

You were hoping for something soft

and loyal and clean and wondrously careful–

 
a form of otherwise vicious habit

can have long ears and be called a rabbit.

Dead. Died. Will die. want.

Morning, midnight. I asked you

 
if you were going to get a pet

what kind of animal would you get.

                                               1959