robert duncan

a reverse line order experiment:

bending the bow

From which it sprang:
to the trembling daylight
recall the arrow or song.

And I would play Orpheus for you again,
inconsolate,
having something of sister and of wife,
the quick high notes. You are a girl there too,
the deep tones and shadows I will call a woman.

You stand behind where-I-am.

Sweeps the string, can illustrate
my hand
that sleep, only in the swift fulfillment
of the wish, the bow and the lyre,
there is a connexion working
in both directions, as in,
at the extremity of this design.

Ghostly exhilarations at thought of her,
of an inner anticipation of...? reaching to touch
there shakes in the currents of...of air?
The day is hers. My hand writing here
Who comes close in to my thought so that
in the course of a letter - to a friend,
in the course of a letter - I am still
what I would take hold of.

I'd been current disturbing composition of
surfaces, leads into the other
carnations painted growing.
Upon whose surfaces,
the whole of coffee cups and saucers,
the presst-glass creamer, the pewter sage bowl,
the litter of coffee cups and saucers.
Where the cold light gleams reflecting the window
upon the surface of the table,
with the sending.

Reveries are rivers and flow
til the end rimes in the taut string
bend back the bow in dreams as we may.

We've our business to attend Day's duties.

* * * * *
a poem beginning with a line from pindar

But the eyes in Goya's painting are soft,
into the deprivations of desiring sight.
By dimness, up from blind innocence, ensnared
is carnal fate that sends the soul wailing
falling upon the brown boy's slight body
bruised by redemption. The copper light(s)
have a hurt voluptuous grace.
In Goya's canvas Cupid and Psyche
torso-reverberations of a Grecian lyre,
notes of an old music pace the air,
where I see your quick face.

Who is it that goes there?
quick adulterous tread at the heart,
god-step at the margins of thought.

The light foot hears you and the brightness begins.