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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley was born in Arlington, Massachusetts, on May 21, 1926. He attended...
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FURTHER READING
Poems about Eating
Apples
by Grace Schulman
Breakfast
by Minnie Bruce Pratt
Dead Horse
by Thomas Lux
Dream In Which I Meet Myself
by Lynn Emanuel
Eating Poetry
by Mark Strand
Eating The Bones
by Ellen Bass
Egg
by Aleš Šteger
The Book of the Dead Man (Food)
by Marvin Bell
To a Poor Old Woman
by William Carlos Williams
Woman on Twenty-Second Eating Berries
by Stanley Plumly
Related Prose
Groundbreaking Book: For Love by Robert Creeley (1962)
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A Wicker Basket  
by Robert Creeley

Comes the time when it's later
and onto your table the headwaiter
puts the bill, and very soon after
rings out the sound of lively laughter--

Picking up change, hands like a walrus,
and a face like a barndoor's,
and a head without any apparent size,
nothing but two eyes--

So that's you, man,
or me. I make it as I can,
I pick up, I go
faster than they know--

Out the door, the street like a night,
any night, and no one in sight,
but then, well, there she is,
old friend Liz--

And she opens the door of her cadillac,
I step in back,
and we're gone.
She turns me on--

There are very huge stars, man, in the sky,
and from somewhere very far off someone hands
   me a slice of apple pie,
with a gob of white, white ice cream on top of it,
and I eat it--

Slowly. And while certainly
they are laughing at me, and all around me is racket
of these cats not making it, I make it

in my wicker basket.



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From Selected Poems by Robert Creeley. Copyright © 1991 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Used with permission. Originally published in For Love: Poems 1950-1960 (Scribner, 1962).
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