Robert Duncan

x: It’s Spring. Love’s Spring.

                                                  The April stirring

      not to be denied.  Inert

      wonderings try me.

And I am very Death that lusts after all men;

that straight and crooked draws into his ken

      all bright live eyes

      to wive.  Avidly.

The mind possesses them. Another life!

To trick the inevitable weather.

To spring the catch:  but the catch

      springs up from the song

long as the year, an engagement, lifelasting,

      even distracted . . .

It is a melody skirted, a configuration

      — as in Schönberg’s Serenade —

a blossoming in shame, almost seen

      or heard, but never . . .

an exact other melody of the strings

      that art refuses to render

      useful.

And so — unrenderd —

      we are torn apart

— as April rips the weather of our hearts —

      longing from longing:

we could not afford,  or lovewise devise

      the cost

      that sustains us.

Robert Duncan

Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow
by Robert Duncan

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 likeness 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.