Robert Duncan

My mother would be a falconress, And I, her gay falcon treading her wrist, would fly to bring back from the blue of the sky to her, bleeding, a prize, where I dream in my little hood with many bells jangling when I'd turn my head. My mother would be a falconress, and she sends me as far as her will goes. She lets me ride to the end of her curb where I fall back in anguish. I dread that she will cast me away, for I fall, I mis-take, I fail in her mission. She would bring down the little birds. And I would bring down the little birds. When will she let me bring down the little birds, pierced from their flight with their necks broken, their heads like flowers limp from the stem? I tread my mother's wrist and would draw blood. Behind the little hood my eyes are hooded. I have gone back into my hooded silence, talking to myself and dropping off to sleep. For she has muffled my dreams in the hood she has made me, sewn round with bells, jangling when I move. She rides with her little falcon upon her wrist. She uses a barb that brings me to cower. She sends me abroad to try my wings and I come back to her. I would bring down the little birds to her I may not tear into, I must bring back perfectly. I tear at her wrist with my beak to draw blood, and her eye holds me, anguisht, terrifying. She draws a limit to my flight. Never beyond my sight, she says. She trains me to fetch and to limit myself in fetching. She rewards me with meat for my dinner. But I must never eat what she sends me to bring her. Yet it would have been beautiful, if she would have carried me, always, in a little hood with the bells ringing, at her wrist, and her riding to the great falcon hunt, and me flying up to the curb of my heart from her heart to bring down the skylark from the blue to her feet, straining, and then released for the flight. My mother would be a falconress, and I her gerfalcon raised at her will, from her wrist sent flying, as if I were her own pride, as if her pride knew no limits, as if her mind sought in me flight beyond the horizon. Ah, but high, high in the air I flew. And far, far beyond the curb of her will, were the blue hills where the falcons nest. And then I saw west to the dying sun-- it seemd my human soul went down in flames. I tore at her wrist, at the hold she had for me, until the blood ran hot and I heard her cry out, far, far beyond the curb of her will to horizons of stars beyond the ringing hills of the world where the falcons nest I saw, and I tore at her wrist with my savage beak. I flew, as if sight flew from the anguish in her eye beyond her sight, sent from my striking loose, from the cruel strike at her wrist, striking out from the blood to be free of her. My mother would be a falconress, and even now, years after this, when the wounds I left her had surely heald, and the woman is dead, her fierce eyes closed, and if her heart were broken, it is stilld I would be a falcon and go free. I tread her wrist and wear the hood, talking to myself, and would draw blood.

I know a little language of my cat, though Dante says that animals have no need of speech and Nature abhors the superfluous.   My cat is fluent.   He converses when he wants with me.   To speak is natural.   And whales and wolves I’ve heard in choral soundings of the sea and air know harmony and have an eloquence that stirs my mind and heart—they touch the soul.   Here Dante’s religion that would set Man apart damns the effluence of our life from us to build therein its powerhouse. It’s in his animal communication Man is true, immediate, and in immediacy, Man is all animal. His senses quicken in the thick of the symphony, old circuits of animal rapture and alarm, attentions and arousals in which an identity rearrives. He hears particular voices among the concert, the slightest rustle in the undertones, rehearsing a nervous aptitude yet to prove his. He sees the flick of significant red within the rushing mass of ruddy wilderness and catches the glow of a green shirt to delite him in a glowing field of green —it speaks to him— and in the arc of the spectrum color speaks to color. The rainbow articulates a promise he remembers he but imitates in noises that he makes, this speech in every sense the world surrounding him. He picks up on the fugitive tang of mace amidst the savory mass, and taste in evolution is an everlasting key. There is a pun of scents in what makes sense. Myrrh it may have been, the odor of the announcement that filld the house. He wakes from deepest sleep upon a distant signal and waits as if crouching, springs to life.

[Étude from the Fourth Treatise of the Convivio, Chapter XXVII] In my youth, not unstaind and in much ignoble;   in manhood, struggling to ring true   yet knowing often my defection from these graces Dante lists proper to Man:   temperance, courage, love, courtesy, and loyalty.   I speak still to sustain his meaning in my own. And, in you, whatever I have known of grace comes through to me. Now, upon old age:“Our life has a fixt course and a simple path” I would not avoid,“that of our right nature” —then Dante adds, himself quoting: “and in every part of our life place is given for certain things

[De Vulgari Eloquentia, I,I] “We will endeavor, the word aiding us from Heaven, to be of service to the vernacular speech” —from “Heaven” these “draughts of the sweetest   honey-milk”, si dolcemente from the language we first heard endearments    whisperings infant song and revery a world we wanted    to go out into, to come to ourselves     into, organizations in the sound of them verging upon meaning, upon “Heaven”, hermetic talk into which my range of understandings was to grow    for love of it portents and adults expounding controversial doctrines, personal science fictions and rules of order, but our own “is that which we acquire without any rule”    for love of it “imitating our nurses”

It’s in the perilous boughs of the tree out of blue sky    the wind sings loudest surrounding me. And solitude,   a wild solitude ’s reveald,   fearfully,   high     I’d climb into the shaking uncertainties, part out of longing,   part     daring my self, part to see that widening of the world,   part to find my own, my secret hiding sense and place, where from afar all voices and scenes come back —the barking of a dog,   autumnal burnings, far calls,   close calls—   the boy I was calls out to me here the man where I am   “Look! I’ve been where you most fear to be.”

In the groves of Africa from their natural wonder the wildebeest, zebra, the okapi, the elephant, have enterd the marvelous. No greater marvelous know I than the mind’s natural jungle. The wives of the Congo distil there their red and the husbands hunt lion with spear and paint Death-spore on their shields, wear his teeth, claws and hair on ordinary occasions. There the Swahili open his doors, let loose thru the trees the tides of Death’s sound and distil from their leaves the terrible red. He is the consort of dreams I have seen, heard in the orchestral dark like the barking of dogs. Death is the dog-headed man zebra striped and surrounded by silence who walks like a lion, who is black. It was his voice crying come back, that Virginia Woolf heard, turnd her fine skull, hounded and haunted, stopt, pointed into the scent where I see her in willows, in fog, at the river of sound in the trees. I see her prepare there to enter Death’s mountains like a white Afghan hound pass into the forest, closed after, let loose in the leaves with more grace than a hound and more wonder there even with flowers wound in her hair, allowing herself like Ophelia a last pastoral gesture of love toward the world. And I see all our tortures absolved in the fog, dispersed in Death’s forests, forgotten. I see all this gentleness like a hound in the water float upward and outward beyond my dark hand. I am waiting this winter for the more complete black-out, for the negro armies in the eucalyptus, for the cities laid open and the cold in the love-light, for hounds women and birds to go back to their forests and leave us our solitude. .   .   . Negroes, negroes, all those princes, holding cups of rhinoceros bone, make magic with my blood. Where beautiful Marijuana towers taller than the eucalyptus, turns within the lips of night and falls, falls downward, where as giant Kings we gathered and devourd her burning hands and feet, O Moonbar thee and Clarinet! those talismans that quickened in their sheltering leaves like thieves, those Negroes, all those princes holding to their mouths like Death the cups of rhino bone, were there to burn my hands and feet, divine the limit of the bone and with their magic tie and twist me like a rope. I know no other continent of Africa more dark than this dark continent of my breast. And when we are deserted there, when the rustling electric has passt thru the air, once more we begin in the blind and blood throat the African catches; and Desdemona, Desdemona like a demon wails within our bodies, warns against this towering Moor of self and then laments her passing from him. And I cry, Hear! Hear in the coild and secretive ear the drums that I hear beat. The Negroes, all those princes holding cups of bone and horn, are there in halls of blood that I call forests, in the dark and shining caverns where beats heart and pulses brain, in jungles of my body, there Othello moves, striped black and white, the dog-faced fear. Moves I, I, I, whom I have seen as black as Orpheus, pursued deliriously his sound and drownd in hunger’s tone, the deepest wilderness. Then it was I, Death singing, who bewildered the forest. I thot him my lover like a hound of great purity disturbing the shadow and flesh of the jungle. This was the beginning of the ending year. From all of the empty the tortured appear, and the bird-faced children crawl out of their fathers and into that never filld pocket, the no longer asking but silent, seeing nowhere the final sleep. The halls of Africa we seek in dreams as barriers of dream against the deep, and seas disturbd turn back upon their tides into the rooms deserted at the roots of love. There is no end. And how sad then is even the Congo. How the tired sirens come up from the water, not to be toucht but to lie on the rocks of the thunder. How sad then is even the marvelous!