Robert Duncan

the absence was there before the meeting the radical of

presence and absence does not return with death’s chance-

encounter, as in the old duality, life or death, wherein

the transcendence of the one translates the other into an everness

we do not meet in heaven, that outward of hell and death’s

beauty it is a bright and terrible disk

where Jack is, where

Charles is, where James is, where Berg is is here in the continuous

carmen O, some things—di—breathe into—aspirate—and lead away—

deducite! for the soul is a thing among many

Berkeley shimmers and shakes

in my mind most lost the absence preceded the place

and the friendships Lady Rosario among us of Spanish and Greek rushes

from the hedges around the gas station,

swirled with Lawrence’s medlars and

sorb-apples

What

is it reminds us of white gods

flesh-fragrant

as if with sweat the delicious rottenness that teems with

the life of the mind’s heart κρατἡρ of an agreement, a mixing vessel,

a chasm, a threshold—Βάθρον—a stair of

brazen steps, hollow wild pear tree—κοίλεο τάχἐρδον

—between among

sat down

I am only leonine in the

breath of night awakening blurred neighbours as your

faces move Jack writing the Italian underground we

are too tired to live like lions on john walls and gay-bars

didn’t laugh at the Red Lizard or the Black Cat as your

faces move beyond me suddenly Zukofsky joins the language,

now become larger, sharper, more gathering than the lingo

wherein Berkeley began the movement

the first of your poems

I read: Among my friends love is a great sorrow (brought to me

in typescript by Jack, 1946, that we three should meet)—no voice

like it turns, turns in the body of thought Among

my friends love is a wage/that one might have for an honest living

turns, turns

in thought’s body becomes

O Lovers, I am only one of you!

We, convivial in what is ours!

this ringing

with Dante’s voice before the comedy

sorrow and guide-dance the courage of the work the language

is a lion sentinels are owls of work’s body glamouring passages

the poem WHOSE alongside James Hillman’s thought of the heart

Jess tells me you just went, having the heart to whose

heart? I wish to say mine impertinence yours that too

is impertinence nevertheless, always against the heart

failures: cowardice, nostalgia, sentimentalism, aestheticizing, doubt,

vanity, withdrawal, trepidation

fierce, you

name many times this uprising

—political, mental, sexual, social—you name it—mounting rung by

rung

this climax to what overview

under the double ax

whose heart

the lilies burn rose-orange and yellow buds about to,

with a touch of blood near imagination of Blake’s Eternity,

except one would be among them flaming into one another,

not looking out there at the table, the vase, the tall, leafy stems

blossoming

stopped over the ‘Instant Mythology,’ knowing

an old language from you one-inch capsules in the hot water

break at both ends, then burst purple, green, red, blue,

‘pour enfants ages 5 ans et plus, pas comestible, chaque

capsule peut contenir: Centaure, Dragon, Pégase, Licorne,

Sirène—calling—mettez la capsule dans l’eau tiede/chaude

et regardez un caractère mythologique apparaîte’ techo-myth

translates out of the real book into the way language

works regardez!

the travois of the poetic mind,

the drag-load harnessed to the body, firely, through

the glowing flowers warm and hot, the watery spell of

any reel of language poluphloisboíous sea-coast

window-rain is Heimat sunlight travels the fingers

come subito lampo a sudden lamp in the room outside

strikes the fir tree horizon of eyes through passages,

sublime envelopes, and the lives raging within life

There is no exstacy of Beauty in which I will not remember Man’s misery,

compounded by what we have done sighted in ruins, neither old

nor discontinuous

(I smile it is the thought of you a happiness

that could not be without your having been

there

quarrelling)

the permanent wall of our shape the languages

burn and muse the alpha-beta, like the yellow birds

(Dendoica petechia—Parulidae) disappear among spring yellowing leaves,

pricklings, of the holly as its tree renews toward winter robins

and staerlinc wait for red berries where the inkberry is

eastern the cherries are white among the greens, this side

of glass towers with bicycles on the balconies almost rented the bicycle

on the 37th floor and figs like testicles on the branches enjoy

the sexual sun

I remember the quarrel over experience—on Greene Street—

and still think you spoke too soon of a sacred cut-out it was the process

of the actual we were both about

what exactly do we experience in poēsis

over the neat ‘I’ that thinks itself a unity of things or disunity des-

perately untrue to whatever we are tied to—like one’s grief or the smother-

ing domestic realism, or the I-feel, so deep and steeply, no one wants to

listen without a drumhead positivisms of the self

that die into an urn yet, O gratefully / I take the gift of my daily life!

the accusations were: ‘fatuous,’ ‘rhetorical,’ ‘pretentious,’ ‘bourgeois

interior decorator’ (of Pound), continuous writing of the ironing board,

the kitchen, recipes, the jam pots textures, tones, tastes of the world

they are not glabrous, nor is the skin, riding the earth / round into the

sunlight again one wishes the positivities were falling into that Nature

of Me / that includes the cosmos it believes in how curious, not sad, of

all animals, not merely

you came here in 1982 to read Ground Work

up to that point no one could leave the room of cat’s fur, black

stone, and its electric familiar What Is

mind-store mind-change mindful mind-life Eternal

Mind the smile

the burn

not to

want any longer to wait for the thematic release

thinking of you thinking of James Hillman thinking of Corbin—

the idea of a unified experiencing subject vis-à-vis a world

that is multiple, disunited, chaotic. The first person

singular, that little devil of an I—who, as psychoanalysis

long ago has seen is neither first, nor a person, nor

singular—is the confessional voice, imagining itself

to be the unifier of experience. But experience can only

be unified by the style in which it is enacted, by the images

which formed it, by its repetitive thematics, and by the

relations amid which it unfolds. It does not have to be

owned to be held. The heart in the breast is not your

heart only: it is a microcosmic sun, a cosmos of all

possible experiences that no one can own

against heart

failures

I gather as I must images of independent realities I,

subjected to the gaze of things, as I think of you

as you say the etymology is false,

bringing the core,

care—κἡρ—κἡρ together the heart and the goddess, who

is κἡρες plural among things thinking of you thinking of

Hillman thinking again, Beauty is an epistemological necessity thinking of

a sudden call to climb the ladder of which you

did not mean because it does not mean, though

it is recited ‘Never’ being the name of what is infinite

of cross-ways

of brazen

steps

Source: The Holy Forest: Collected Poems of Robin Blaser (University of California Press, 2006)