Poetry, a Natural Thing by 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 which 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 extravagant 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.