Robert Creeley: Mother's Voice

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Burning the autumn leaves in Norwich, Connecticut: photo by Jack Delano, November 1940 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

In these few years
since her death I hear
mother's voice say
under my own, I won't

want any more of that.
My cheekbones resonate
with her emphasis. Nothing
of not wanting only

but the distance there from
common fact of others
frightens me. I look out
at all this demanding world

and try to put it quietly back,
from me, say, thank you,
I've already had some
though I haven't

and would like to
but I've said no, she has,
it's not my own voice anymore.
It's higher as hers was

and accommodates too simply
its frustrations when
I at least think I want more
and must have it.

Robert Creeley (1926-2005): Mother's Voice, from Mother's Voice, 1981


My mother's people were all Maine people, they had specific ways of saying things, they spoke with a particular humor. It was a way of speaking that I learned as a child from my increasingly single parent... The ways I placed the world were thus given a form in language from early on. And in emotional moments I now find I increasingly return to that language that's particularly local to my childhood and to the place where I was brought up.

-- Robert Creeley, in Tom Clark: Robert Creeley and the Genius of the American Common Place, 1993

Street scene, Brockton [?], Massachusetts: photo by Jack Delano, c. November/December 1940 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

Robert Creeley: Mother's Voice (1981), cover by Tom Clark: photo by Gary Parrish/Farfalla