Robert Duncan

The white peacock roosting might have been Christ, featherd robe of Osiris, the radiant bird, a sword-flash, percht in the tree and the other,    the fumed-glass slide —were like night and day, the slit of an eye opening in time vertical to the horizon

might have been. Certainly these ashes might have been pleasures. Pilgrims on their way to the Holy Places remark this place. Isn’t it plain to all that these mounds were palaces? This was once a city among men, a gathering together of spirit. It was measured by the Lord and found wanting. It was measured by the Lord and found wanting, destroyd by the angels that inhabit longing. Surely this is Great Sodom where such cries as if men were birds flying up from the swamp ring in our ears, where such fears that were once desires walk, almost spectacular, stalking the desolate circles, red eyed. This place rumord to have been a City surely was, separated from us by the hand of the Lord. The devout have laid out gardens in the desert, drawn water from springs where the light was blighted. How tenderly they must attend these friendships or all is lost. All is lost. Only the faithful hold this place green. Only the faithful hold this place green where the crown of fiery thorns descends. Men that once lusted grow listless. A spirit wrappd in a cloud, ashes more than ashes, fire more than fire, ascends. Only these new friends gather joyous here, where the world like Great Sodom lies under fear. The world like Great Sodom lies under Love and knows not the hand of the Lord that moves. This the friends teach where such cries as if men were birds fly up from the crowds gatherd and howling in the heat of the sun. In the Lord Whom the friends have named at last Love the images and loves of the friends never die. This place rumord to have been Sodom is blessd in the Lord’s eyes.

Was he then Adam of the Burning Way? hid away in the heat like wrath conceald in Love’s face, or the seed, Eris in Eros, key and lock of what I was?      I could not speak the releasing word.      For into a dark matter he came and askt me to say what I could not say.      “I ..” All the flame in me stopt against my tongue. My heart was a stone, a dumb unmanageable thing in me, a darkness that stood athwart his need for the enlightening, the “I love you” that has only this one quick in time, this one start when its moment is true. Such is the sickness of many a good thing that now into my life from long ago this refusing to say I love you has bound the weeping, the yielding, the yearning to be taken again, into a knot, a waiting, a string so taut it taunts the song, it resists the touch. It grows dark to draw down the lover’s hand from its lightness to what’s underground.

And a tenth part of Okeanos is given to dark night a tithe of the pure water    under    earth so that the clear fountains pour from rock face, tears stream from the caverns and clefts, down-running, carving woundrous ways in basalt resistance, cutting deep as they go into layers of time-layerd Gaia where She sleeps— the cold water, the black rushing gleam, the moving down-rush, wash, gush out over bed-rock, toiling the boulders in flood, purling in deeps, broad flashing in falls— And a tenth part of bright clear Okeanos his circulations— mists, rains, sheets, sheathes— lies in poisonous depths, the black water. Styx    this carver of caverns beneath us is. Styx    this black water,    this down-pouring. The well is deep.    From its stillness the words our voices speak      echo. Resonance follows resonance. Waves of this sounding come up to us. We draw the black water, pure and cold. The light of day is not as bright as this crystal flowing. Three thousand years we have recited its virtue out of Hesiod. Is it twenty-five thousand since the ice withdrew from the lands    and we came forth from the realm of caverns where the river beneath the earth    we knew we go back to. Styx pouring down in the spring from its glacial remove, from the black ice. Fifty million years—from the beginning of what we are— we knew the depth of this well to be. Fifty million years deep    —but our knowing deepens —time deepens— this still water we thirst for      in dreams we dread.

“That God is colouring Newton doth shew” — William Blake Erecting beyond the boundaries of all government his grand Station and Customs, I find what I have made there a Gate, a staking out of his art in Inconsequence.  I have in mind a poetry that will frame the willingness of the heart and deliver it over to the arrest of Time, a sentence  as if there could stand some solidity  most spacial in its intent against the drifts and appearances that arise and fall away in time from the crude events of physical space.  The Mind alone holds the consequence of the erection to be true, so that Desire and Imagination usurp the place of the Invisible Throne. It is an angel then, weeping and yet ever attending the betrayal of the Word I mean to come to in the end.  For my sake, the blood must be somewhere in time and in its own naming of place actual, and death must be  as my own awaits me  immediate to undo from its reality the physical body, all there is of the matter of me that is mine from me.  The would-be dialecticians—Inquisitors of the New Dispensation in Poetry and Historians of Opprobrium, the Realists and Materialists—come forward to hold the party line against his ideality.  There are too many listeners.  There are too many voices in the one line.  They must enter the Ideal to do so, for he has changed his mind, as if the Eternal existed only momentarily and went out with him.  The Chairman of the Politbureau gets his number  and moves to isolate his heresy.  The number is no longer the same.  He has gone back into the exchange of numbers.  The phone continues ringing in the pattern of the message they strive to listen  to report to the Bureau of Poetic Numbers and Approved Measures. This is to say to the month of April and the rainbow dancer, I am with you.  I belong to the company without number.  I shall live one hundred years and then be gone.  Here and now  only I from this life can come forward to impersonate the necessity of his being here.  His, the horizon.  His, the perspectives and outlines.  His, the regulation of the relevant.  I will willingly assume his numbers among my own. The rest is all Asia, the astral miasma, the Undoing we came from, my version of Who-He-Is-In-Reality, the domain of colouring invading the Responsible.

II Something is taking place. Horns thrust upward from the brow. Hooves beat impatient where feet once were. My son, youth grows alarming in your face. Your innocent regard is cruelly charming to me now. You bristle where my fond hand would stir to stroke your cheek.    I do not dare. Irregular meters beat between your heart and mine. Snuffling the air you take the heat and scan the lines you take in going as if I were or were not there and overtake me. And where it seems but yesterday I spilld the wine, you too grow beastly to become a man. Peace, peace.    I’ve had enough.    What can I say when song’s demanded? —I’ve had my fill of song? My longing to sing grows full. Time’s emptied me. And where my youth was, now the Sun in you grows hot, your day is young, my place you take triumphantly.    All along it’s been for you, for this lowering of your horns in challenge. She had her will of me and will not let my struggling spirit in itself be free.

Neither our vices nor our virtues further the poem. “They came up and died just like they do every year on the rocks.” The poem feeds upon thought, feeling, impulse, to breed    itself, a spiritual urgency at the dark ladders leaping. This beauty is an inner persistence toward the source striving against (within) down-rushet of the river, a call we heard and answer in the lateness of the world primordial bellowings from which the youngest world might spring, salmon not in the well where the hazelnut falls but at the falls battling, inarticulate, blindly making it. This is one picture apt for the mind. A second: a moose painted by Stubbs, where last year’s extravagant antlers lie on the ground. The forlorn moosey-faced poem wears new antler-buds, the same, “a little heavy, a little contrived”, his only beauty to be all moose.

I The light foot hears you and the brightness begins god-step at the margins of thought, quick adulterous tread at the heart. Who is it that goes there? Where I see your quick face notes of an old music pace the air, torso-reverberations of a Grecian lyre. In Goya’s canvas Cupid and Psyche have a hurt voluptuous grace bruised by redemption. The copper light falling upon the brown boy’s slight body is carnal fate that sends the soul wailing up from blind innocence, ensnared by dimness into the deprivations of desiring sight. But the eyes in Goya’s painting are soft, diffuse with rapture absorb the flame. Their bodies yield out of strength. Waves of visual pleasure wrap them in a sorrow previous to their impatience. A bronze of yearning, a rose that burns the tips of their bodies, lips, ends of fingers, nipples. He is not wingd. His thighs are flesh, are clouds lit by the sun in its going down, hot luminescence at the loins of the visible. But they are not in a landscape. They exist in an obscurity. The wind spreading the sail serves them. The two jealous sisters eager for her ruin serve them. That she is ignorant, ignorant of what Love will be, serves them. The dark serves them. The oil scalding his shoulder serves them, serves their story. Fate, spinning, knots the threads for Love. Jealousy, ignorance, the hurt . . . serve them. II This is magic. It is passionate dispersion. What if they grow old? The gods would not allow it. Psyche is preserved. In time we see a tragedy, a loss of beauty the glittering youth of the god retains—but from this threshold it is age that is beautiful. It is toward the old poets we go, to their faltering, their unaltering wrongness that has style, their variable truth, the old faces, words shed like tears from a plenitude of powers time stores. A stroke.   These little strokes.   A chill. The old man, feeble, does not recoil. Recall. A phase so minute, only a part of the word in- jerrd. The Thundermakers descend, damerging a nuv. A nerb. The present dented of the U nighted stayd. States. The heavy clod? Cloud. Invades the brain. What if lilacs last in this dooryard bloomd? Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower— where among these did the power reside that moves the heart? What flower of the nation bride-sweet broke to the whole rapture? Hoover, Coolidge, Harding, Wilson hear the factories of human misery turning out commodities. For whom are the holy matins of the heart ringing? Noble men in the quiet of morning hear Indians singing the continent’s violent requiem. Harding, Wilson, Taft, Roosevelt, idiots fumbling at the bride’s door, hear the cries of men in meaningless debt and war. Where among these did the spirit reside that restores the land to productive order? McKinley, Cleveland, Harrison, Arthur, Garfield, Hayes, Grant, Johnson, dwell in the roots of the heart’s rancor. How sad “amid lanes and through old woods” echoes Whitman’s love for Lincoln! There is no continuity then. Only a few posts of the good remain. I too that am a nation sustain the damage where smokes of continual ravage obscure the flame. It is across great scars of wrong I reach toward the song of kindred men and strike again the naked string old Whitman sang from. Glorious mistake! that cried: “The theme is creative and has vista.” “He is the president of regulation.” I see always the under side turning, fumes that injure the tender landscape. From which up break lilac blossoms of courage in daily act striving to meet a natural measure. III (for Charles Olson) Psyche’s tasks—the sorting of seeds wheat      barley      oats      poppy      coriander anise      beans      lentils      peas      —every grain in its right place before nightfall; gathering the gold wool from the cannibal sheep (for the soul must weep and come near upon death); harrowing Hell for a casket Proserpina keeps that must not be opend . . . containing beauty? no!      Melancholy coild like a serpent that is deadly sleep we are not permitted to succumb to. These are the old tasks. You’ve heard them before. They must be impossible. Psyche must despair, be brought to her insect instructor; must obey the counsels of the green reed; saved from suicide by a tower speaking, must follow to the letter freakish instructions. In the story the ants help. The old man at Pisa mixd in whose mind (to draw the sorts) are all seeds as a lone ant from a broken ant-hill had part restored by an insect, was upheld by a lizard (to draw the sorts) the wind is part of the process defines a nation of the wind— father of many notions, Who? let the light into the dark? began the many movements of the passion? West from east   men push. The islands are blessd (cursed)   that swim below the sun, man upon whom the sun has gone down! There is the hero who struggles east widdershins to free the dawn   and must woo Night’s daughter, sorcery, black passionate rage, covetous queens, so that the fleecy sun go   back from Troy, Colchis, India . . . all the blazing armies spent, he must struggle alone toward the pyres of Day. The light that is Love rushes on toward passion. It verges upon dark. Roses and blood flood the clouds. Solitary first riders advance into legend. This land, where I stand, was all legend in my grandfathers’ time: cattle raiders, animal tribes, priests, gold. It was the West. Its vistas painters saw in diffuse light, in melancholy, in abysses left by glaciers as if they had been the sun primordial carving empty enormities out of the rock. Snakes lurkd guarding secrets.         Those first ones survived solitude. Scientia holding the lamp, driven by doubt; Eros naked in foreknowledge smiling in his sleep;    and the light spilld, burning his shoulder—the outrage that conquers legend— passion, dismay, longing, search flooding up where the Beloved is lost. Psyche travels life after life, my life, station after station, to be tried without break, without news, knowing only—but what did she know? The oracle at Miletus had spoken truth surely: that he was Serpent-Desire that flies thru the air, a monster-husband. But she saw him fair whom Apollo’s mouthpiece said spread pain beyond cure    to those wounded by his arrows. Rilke torn by a rose thorn blackend toward Eros.          Cupidinous Death! that will not take no for an answer. IV Oh yes!      Bless the footfall where step by step      the boundary walker (in Maverick Road      the snow thud by thud      from the roof circling the house—another tread) that foot      informd by the weight of all things that can be elusive no more than a nearness to the mind of a single image Oh yes!      this most dear the catalyst force that renders clear the days of a life from the surrounding medium! Yes, beautiful rare wilderness! wildness that verifies strength of my tame mind, clearing held against indians, health that prepared to meet death, the stubborn hymns going up into the ramifications of the hostile air that, decaptive, gives way. Who is there?   O, light the light! The Indians give way, the clearing falls. Great Death gives way   and unprepares us. Lust gives way.    The Moon gives way. Night gives way.   Minutely,   the Day gains. She saw the body of her beloved dismemberd in waking . . . or was it in sight?Finders Keepers we sang when we were children      or were taught to sing before our histories began      and we began who were beloved      our animal life toward the Beloved,      sworn to be Keepers. On the hill before the wind came the grass moved toward the one sea, blade after blade dancing in waves. There the children turn the ring to the left. There the children turn the ring to the right. Dancing . . . Dancing . . . And the lonely psyche goes up thru the boy to the king that in the caves of history dreams. Round and round the children turn. London Bridge that is a kingdom falls. We have come so far that all the old stories whisper once more. Mount Segur, Mount Victoire, Mount Tamalpais . . . rise to adore the mystery of Love! (An ode? Pindar’s art, the editors tell us, was not a statue but a mosaic, an accumulation of metaphor. But if he was archaic, not classic, a survival of obsolete mode, there may have been old voices in the survival that directed the heart. So, a line from a hymn came in a novel I was reading to help me. Psyche, poised to leap—and Pindar too, the editors write, goes too far, topples over—listend to a tower that said,Listen to Me! The oracle had said,Despair! The Gods themselves abhor his power. And then the virgin flower of the dark falls back flesh of our flesh from which everywhere . . . the information flows that is yearning. A line of Pindar moves from the area of my lamp toward morning. In the dawn that is nowhere I have seen the willful children clockwise and counter-clockwise turning.

We have gone out in boats upon the sea at night, lost, and the vast waters close traps of fear about us. The boats are driven apart, and we are alone at last under the incalculable sky, listless, diseased with stars. Let the oars be idle, my love, and forget at this time our love like a knife between us defining the boundaries that we can never cross nor destroy as we drift into the heart of our dream, cutting the silence, slyly, the bitter rain in our mouths and the dark wound closed in behind us. Forget depth-bombs, death and promises we made, gardens laid waste, and, over the wastelands westward, the rooms where we had come together bombd. But even as we leave, your love turns back. I feel your absence like the ringing of bells silenced. And salt over your eyes and the scales of salt between us. Now, you pass with ease into the destructive world. There is a dry crash of cement. The light fails, falls into the ruins of cities upon the distant shore and within the indestructible night I am alone.

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind, that is not mine, but is a made place, that is mine, it is so near to the heart, an eternal pasture folded in all thought so that there is a hall therein that is a made place, created by light wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall. Wherefrom fall all architectures I am I say are likenesses of the First Beloved whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady. She it is Queen Under The Hill whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words that is a field folded. It is only a dream of the grass blowing east against the source of the sun in an hour before the sun’s going down whose secret we see in a children’s game of ring a round of roses told. Often I am permitted to return to a meadow as if it were a given property of the mind that certain bounds hold against chaos, that is a place of first permission, everlasting omen of what is.