this is a poem by Robert Duncan from GROUND WORK II. I have only a recording of it, but felt compelled to transcribe to the best of my ability. The french, I do not know the french at the end. take suggestions on possible proper readings of that; hope you like. it makes me think and turn and turn and turn and look at the world and me in the world.
bless you. YOU.
AN ALTERNATE LIFE
in the south,
tears will not start here
the mountain i see misty ascending
weighs in as if it were a cloud
is not here, it is louder though soundless than the magpie's song
Dawn did not start here.
The heart I stand, whose need of you will obey your sense of the right and wrong of it,
for ultimately there must be in our Geometries,
needs many lives, a meeting place throughout.
Am I so Darkened, no Ray of the Sun will Venture?
No will raise out to touch the release waiting.
No hand reaches or would reach to verify,
quickening into its actual earth element,
the visual mountain.
I am talking about the beginnings of an age in my body,
Light as a mountain, hanging in the air
no one may lift from me
in youth I think now, this fathering shadow fell forward
from every glance, drawing to-ward me alarms, turnings,
alternate engagements - what compels? It is a heavy
light shining I am speaking of.
Visibly I am moving over to the other side of the picture.
An old man's hand fumbles at the young man's crotch.
An old man's body is about to tremble.
The painter is almost cruel in his detail to make clear, this shaking.
I am talking of a voice shaking.
I am shaking the rattling gourd
of infancy's play at the somber code of the natural symphony,
What sweet, sweeping memorials the violins impart,
more vigorous than ever, the brassy crescendos
the drumbeat ofthe heart penetrates all.
Oh yes! Love will at last let go of me!
I don't want to wait any longer for the thematic release
still as if all the sound were gone into me,
This Sound Alone, the rattling gourd of first things
so faintly sounds, plaintive falling away.
Morning flows over me, the cold washes up against the warmth of me
I stretch my limbs into it.
The new age almost fades from my limbs.
All my old youth
stretches out to fill my flesh
up, up, this skin is singing
this skin addresses the day where I am,
though you were only an incident
and an alternate life
and there I was
as the Lover always is,
swift, leading, seeking to release the catches of your shirt.
broody, sweet, tendering the flame of hurt in the healing
Here in the one life I am leading I am as the lover always is
ALONE before a hand that holds forth the burning of a heart for me to eat again.
The sake of the beloved, in this world the everlasting instructs.
I crouch to eat out the bitter heart
from that withholding hand again.
the mind, the fucking mind.
the stars in its thought
shine forth in abysses
night spaces. the fucking alone brought us deep into.
circling circling circling circling
the matter of love the mind knows
has my own particular death in it.
Wary the predator I am,
watches to surprise the moment when
this hunger will yield in me.
Lovely, ever, this hunting eyes look of you.
In the alternate life, I am visiting early spring again.
Nothing is revised. I am again without help.
This matter of love, the mind knows, has
inconsequential ecstacies in its teasing of time
circling circling
I can no longer spell the word
the beast I follow might have said to me.
It is not death, not my own particular time of dying.
So many alternate lives have died in me.
I wake this morning searching for the life i knew,
like a cemetary in the sun, searching, surrounded by you trees
bathed in the blaze of light and the wash of the sky's blue.
But that was that little graveyard in SoCal,
where you and i walked together years ago
and that blue sky is not today's alternative,
but what really was Our's, I had forgotten.
Here, were the tears long stored up
will not really start. It is really raining.
It is almost cold. The cars rushing past
the open door hiss in the gleam of the road beyond.
There is no full blaze of light, it comes through the downpour
and I come forward to gaze into the downpouring glass,
the black crystal in which I find the world - looking for me.
I hide in my looking.
When we sit down to dinner I will put the looking glass away
I will put away watching for the furtive movement
in the flesh that betrays what I know is hidden there.
I will give up this stalking time and we will converse of arts
and informative reveries.
So I love what is Real, how awkwardly we name it.
The actual, the Real, the authentic, what is.
I have come to it as if I could have been away
flooded through by the sorrow of the unlived, the unanswered
though I knew not and had not the courage of Asking
the Question that Called for It. The Real I Did see.
The Real so touched me, I could not speak before it.
Homecoming.
Now truly the sexual Eros will have left me and have gone on his way
it is a superstition of our time that this sexuality is All, is Lock and Key,
the Body's deepest sleep and waking. At break of day and at midnight's
time of play you are turned away from me
and for a love's sake I once in mounting raptures of my flesh in singing nerves
and mouthing quest, gathered up the Ache and Springe of Lyfe
in do Love however I could make it with you.
I now lie in a dark of my own
nursing my body's unquiet watch.
Angel of this Distress what would you prepare me for
nothing is broken, he, you, will still hold my hand
and sound me where I am.
The dearness alone lights my eyes I feel.
Not until the meaning of our house so changes me
would I read through to what you mean.
Is it time?
How I attend the Now of It.
then and every attention
momentous
It is the impending I address as messenger
under the sullen wait of the increase in time
the hour carries all
but my body heavier than the time it occupies,
would surrender. It would be a marvel
I might await if I were here
in my 8th set of 7 years completed my 9th beginning
Brought into a new Teaching.
But this news I brought forward with me through time
reaching so and what is ours - I knew in the beginning
in myself you did not institute its orders I have come to Know.
Locked in its solitary its appetite the kernel body of me
climbed upon your spirit to light. The darkness wanted out of you.
For company, a flame
an ember
still
bright
solitary eyes unseeing
seek their terminals in night.
And it seems I cradled in this stair,
it was my share you first accepted
to be our's of me. This unwanted need,
I have so worn, I know no longer if it be truly there.
This is my first and final place
in the outlands of the sun's decline
this dark of the sexual moon,
this cold and shadow
Home in time.
and I, ardent and would be,
artful talker of winged words
birds or arrows sing through the air
soar up - not for song alone
this war and this return
but for their end in Time.
La Politic de veur (?)
it came to me to say in this first session of talking in French
ces l'avengance conta la vie (?)
avengance de la vie,
contra ma vie.
a moi, j-sui m no down the fourier to septage (???)
for time is coming to a new age.
The marches of the day
in expert throughout
the risk of the wrong words must charge through
another has always been near,
keeping this watch, dry eyed
to scrutinize what I dare not see as I go
Way, even the thought to be inconsequential in the outcome
Exact of it.
the very ache and spring from which it thought to come,
to this place, this Homeground, this Place Alone.
I was always there.
Not there.
bless you. YOU.
AN ALTERNATE LIFE
in the south,
tears will not start here
the mountain i see misty ascending
weighs in as if it were a cloud
is not here, it is louder though soundless than the magpie's song
Dawn did not start here.
The heart I stand, whose need of you will obey your sense of the right and wrong of it,
for ultimately there must be in our Geometries,
needs many lives, a meeting place throughout.
Am I so Darkened, no Ray of the Sun will Venture?
No will raise out to touch the release waiting.
No hand reaches or would reach to verify,
quickening into its actual earth element,
the visual mountain.
I am talking about the beginnings of an age in my body,
Light as a mountain, hanging in the air
no one may lift from me
in youth I think now, this fathering shadow fell forward
from every glance, drawing to-ward me alarms, turnings,
alternate engagements - what compels? It is a heavy
light shining I am speaking of.
Visibly I am moving over to the other side of the picture.
An old man's hand fumbles at the young man's crotch.
An old man's body is about to tremble.
The painter is almost cruel in his detail to make clear, this shaking.
I am talking of a voice shaking.
I am shaking the rattling gourd
of infancy's play at the somber code of the natural symphony,
What sweet, sweeping memorials the violins impart,
more vigorous than ever, the brassy crescendos
the drumbeat ofthe heart penetrates all.
Oh yes! Love will at last let go of me!
I don't want to wait any longer for the thematic release
still as if all the sound were gone into me,
This Sound Alone, the rattling gourd of first things
so faintly sounds, plaintive falling away.
Morning flows over me, the cold washes up against the warmth of me
I stretch my limbs into it.
The new age almost fades from my limbs.
All my old youth
stretches out to fill my flesh
up, up, this skin is singing
this skin addresses the day where I am,
though you were only an incident
and an alternate life
and there I was
as the Lover always is,
swift, leading, seeking to release the catches of your shirt.
broody, sweet, tendering the flame of hurt in the healing
Here in the one life I am leading I am as the lover always is
ALONE before a hand that holds forth the burning of a heart for me to eat again.
The sake of the beloved, in this world the everlasting instructs.
I crouch to eat out the bitter heart
from that withholding hand again.
the mind, the fucking mind.
the stars in its thought
shine forth in abysses
night spaces. the fucking alone brought us deep into.
circling circling circling circling
the matter of love the mind knows
has my own particular death in it.
Wary the predator I am,
watches to surprise the moment when
this hunger will yield in me.
Lovely, ever, this hunting eyes look of you.
In the alternate life, I am visiting early spring again.
Nothing is revised. I am again without help.
This matter of love, the mind knows, has
inconsequential ecstacies in its teasing of time
circling circling
I can no longer spell the word
the beast I follow might have said to me.
It is not death, not my own particular time of dying.
So many alternate lives have died in me.
I wake this morning searching for the life i knew,
like a cemetary in the sun, searching, surrounded by you trees
bathed in the blaze of light and the wash of the sky's blue.
But that was that little graveyard in SoCal,
where you and i walked together years ago
and that blue sky is not today's alternative,
but what really was Our's, I had forgotten.
Here, were the tears long stored up
will not really start. It is really raining.
It is almost cold. The cars rushing past
the open door hiss in the gleam of the road beyond.
There is no full blaze of light, it comes through the downpour
and I come forward to gaze into the downpouring glass,
the black crystal in which I find the world - looking for me.
I hide in my looking.
When we sit down to dinner I will put the looking glass away
I will put away watching for the furtive movement
in the flesh that betrays what I know is hidden there.
I will give up this stalking time and we will converse of arts
and informative reveries.
So I love what is Real, how awkwardly we name it.
The actual, the Real, the authentic, what is.
I have come to it as if I could have been away
flooded through by the sorrow of the unlived, the unanswered
though I knew not and had not the courage of Asking
the Question that Called for It. The Real I Did see.
The Real so touched me, I could not speak before it.
Homecoming.
Now truly the sexual Eros will have left me and have gone on his way
it is a superstition of our time that this sexuality is All, is Lock and Key,
the Body's deepest sleep and waking. At break of day and at midnight's
time of play you are turned away from me
and for a love's sake I once in mounting raptures of my flesh in singing nerves
and mouthing quest, gathered up the Ache and Springe of Lyfe
in do Love however I could make it with you.
I now lie in a dark of my own
nursing my body's unquiet watch.
Angel of this Distress what would you prepare me for
nothing is broken, he, you, will still hold my hand
and sound me where I am.
The dearness alone lights my eyes I feel.
Not until the meaning of our house so changes me
would I read through to what you mean.
Is it time?
How I attend the Now of It.
then and every attention
momentous
It is the impending I address as messenger
under the sullen wait of the increase in time
the hour carries all
but my body heavier than the time it occupies,
would surrender. It would be a marvel
I might await if I were here
in my 8th set of 7 years completed my 9th beginning
Brought into a new Teaching.
But this news I brought forward with me through time
reaching so and what is ours - I knew in the beginning
in myself you did not institute its orders I have come to Know.
Locked in its solitary its appetite the kernel body of me
climbed upon your spirit to light. The darkness wanted out of you.
For company, a flame
an ember
still
bright
solitary eyes unseeing
seek their terminals in night.
And it seems I cradled in this stair,
it was my share you first accepted
to be our's of me. This unwanted need,
I have so worn, I know no longer if it be truly there.
This is my first and final place
in the outlands of the sun's decline
this dark of the sexual moon,
this cold and shadow
Home in time.
and I, ardent and would be,
artful talker of winged words
birds or arrows sing through the air
soar up - not for song alone
this war and this return
but for their end in Time.
La Politic de veur (?)
it came to me to say in this first session of talking in French
ces l'avengance conta la vie (?)
avengance de la vie,
contra ma vie.
a moi, j-sui m no down the fourier to septage (???)
for time is coming to a new age.
The marches of the day
in expert throughout
the risk of the wrong words must charge through
another has always been near,
keeping this watch, dry eyed
to scrutinize what I dare not see as I go
Way, even the thought to be inconsequential in the outcome
Exact of it.
the very ache and spring from which it thought to come,
to this place, this Homeground, this Place Alone.
I was always there.
Not there.
legionnaire:
Hi! I just wanted to give you a belated welcome to the SG newswire. I'm actually the other politics editor, but have been mired in off site work and so have been more or less completely MIA the less month or so. Anyway, I'm back now and just wanted to say that I'm looking forward to working together, and am glad to have you here.