CATERPILLAR by Robert Bly
| Lifting my coffee cup, I notice a caterpillar crawling over my sheet of ten-cent airmail stamps. The head is black as a Chinese box. Nine soft accordions follow it around, with a waving motion like a flabby mountain. Skinny brushes used to clean pop bottles rise from some of its shoulders. As I pick up the sheet of stamps, the caterpillar advances around and around the edge, and I see his feet: three pairs under the head, four spongelike pairs under the middle body, and two final pairs at the tip, pink as a puppy's hind legs. As he walks, he rears, six pairs of legs off the stamp, waving around in the air! One of the sponge pairs, and the last two tail pairs, the reserve feet, hold on anxiously. It is the first of September. The leaf shadows are less ferocious on the notebook cover. A man accepts his failures more easily - or perhaps summer's insanity is gone? A man notices ordinary earth, scorned in July, with affection, as he settles down to his daily work, to use stamps.
Some of Bly's poems remain a mystery to me - they're full of things I can't quite grasp. This one is much simpler and most of it is open to the reader. Incidentally, I've laid it out here in the line format I used when learning it - it originally appears in print as a prose poem without line breaks, but I can't find what book I discovered it in. I suspect there is a break before "The leaf shadows..." These last few lines stumped me for a while, until I saw how they related to that insanity we call activity and work for work's sake which neglects the simple delights of the world around us.
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