Saturday, April 13, 2013

Robert Duncan

Poetry, a Natural Thing

     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 with 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 extragent 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.

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