Finding the Father - Robert Bly

This poem used to provoke all kinds of emotions for me about my own relationship with fatherspace - my historically internalised father, my then current father, and my idealised father-object (both real father and the archetypal great father). Nowadays, as I've approached the door to the dark house, and brought fire to the lamp, as the heavy brows have lifted - I find another relationship with it. A relationship with my own path into fatherhood. To move through motherspace and into fatherspace and then through it - to "leave home" stably, and lovingly - I'm opening into the view of what I can be and offer as father. The capacity to know how to skillfully bring self-generated meaning to the potential for quiet desperations in fatherspace has been right at the door step of this house. A door which stood right at the end of that extraordinarily long path. I could have never truly guessed that the father I was to find in finding, naming, facing and communing with all of my fathers, would be the father living in me.


Finding the Father - Robert Bly

My friend, this body offers to carry us for nothing - as the ocean carries logs.
So on some days the body wails with its great energy;
it smashes up the boulders,
lifting small crabs, that flow around the sides.

Someone knocks on the door.
We do not have time to dress.
He wants us to go with him through the blowing and rainy streets,
to the dark house.

We will go there, the body says,
and there find the father whom we have never met,
who wandered out in a snowstorm the night we were born,
and who then lost his memory,
and has lived since longing for his child,
whom he saw only once...
while he worked as a shoemaker,
as a cattle herder in Australia,
as a restaurant cook who painted at night.

When you light the lamp you will see him.
he sits there behind the door....
the eyebrows so heavy,
the forehead so light....
lonely in his whole body,
waiting for you.



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