Such Is the Sickness of Many a Good Thing

- Robert Duncan

Was he then Adam of the Burning Way?
hid away in the heat like wrath
     conceald in Love’s face,
or the seed, Eris in Eros,
     key and lock
of what I was?       I could not speak
     the releasing
word.      For into a dark
     matter he came
and askt me to say what
     I could not say. “I ..”

All the flame in me stopt
     against my tongue.
My heart was a stone, a dumb
     unmanageable thing in me,
a darkness that stood athwart
     his need
for the enlightening, the
     “I love you” that has
only this one quick in time,
     this one start
when its moment is true.

Such is the sickness of many a good thing
that now into my life from long ago this
refusing to say I love you has bound
the weeping, the yielding, the
     yearning to be taken again,
into a knot, a waiting, a string

so taut it taunts the song,
it resists the touch. It grows dark
to draw down the lover’s hand
from its lightness to what’s
     underground.

from: Bending the Bow. Copyright 1968.

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 likenesses 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.


by Robert Duncan, from The Opening of the Field. Copyright © 1960 by Robert Duncan. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.