PREFACE: ROBERT DUNCAN BECOMES MY NEWEST FATHER
In the beginning of The H.D. Book Robert Duncan examines frigid verse
which began hot. Reading started writing.
Cut-metal poems the hard-bronze rose sharp
in sculptural moment’s
isolation H.D. surrenders
softness and moisture
for
abruption, unfallen fruit whose ripeness
delineates
locations to preserve poems from wars
and capital Distinct refuge/ image
from time is structured each lifted instant edged
in laser blue
the modern thing does not convey but occurs
does not link To write The R.D. Book which is half real
and half unwritten
therefore
not existing
for the reading to extend
///Existence as the apocalypse of the possible*///
///Take things out of themselves*///
I hope there will be at least
one thousand H.D. Books, at least
one thousand R.D. Books. Poets read poetry and respond.
*Brandon Shimoda
CARNIVAL IN THE VALLEY BETWEEN GRANITE MOUNTAINS
An altitude of banners colors the wind
The open air gala
encircled by mountains
gathers gravity and goes round
to enjoin the circle
of the book What happens in The Book of Day?
A bright round mirror
for the sun
inside the book
Father fills the valley with languages
From its V or crook the valley beams
Beneath land beneath mountains past bedstone
to the deathless
At night
the poems appear as distant netted lights
of a festival of life
in imperturbable placement, display
invitation
UNDERGROUND
During World War III the atmosphere incends until
all we taste is ash
on dry tongues Sanctified by blood
the streets are closed
My life was given
to protect the song Melody
across centuries and the satin thread
of threnody
never to be wove
Enter, my father bid me
Here is the threshold, my mother placed me
My brother carries me through
the cave of law to drink from its spring
My brother the researcher
does not breathe I give my body
as a vessel for the water
Grief is a privilege of love; the line
protects
the possibility of meaning
A poem
does not
instruct. A benediction:
at the expanse of unguarded gates
enter reality
The world
has been destroyed, but it was never
our provision
What lives inside the darkness is nothing
and there, we cannot imagine
IN THE MYTH THE GODS REVIVE PSYCHE
With arson and shooting
as statistical causes forests burn What is transgression
but another [f]act of the world?
The poem becomes
the one
possible habitation I-deal Eros
with vivification:
surpassing the need
to understand flies forward
the need
to live In love there are no “forbidden intensities”
Only acquiescence or
ignoring
prevent
the continuity of Psyche’s required
blindness Myth=DNA
of human activity Love bade Psyche
act against her wish to see
The need to know must be doused
if she were all her life to
vegetate in Love’s palace, kept and captivated
by unknown riches
At first glance, exiled
Before unsorted
hills of grain Psyche kneels Ants help her
create the order of amaranth, corn, millet, and barley
in separate piles
Beside a stream she queries; water shoots bend
to whisper of the rams’ sleep. By these “counsels of the reed”
she attains the golden fleece. Unable to touch
secrets of the tasks given to her
by obedience she wanders
abandoned by love
for curiosity of love
Insects and grasses reveal
toil and patience
Psyche makes efforts
of humility
she cannot complete
without earth’s assistance
producing
her collapse Weary and wasted
to the point of death -
having wounded
and lost love
by longing — the earth itself
works toward Eros
that the hidden god might see himself
Earth of the ear eye taste and touch
rotates
to transform him
by apprehension
Our incomplete service
to the divine, by any standard
wanting Psyche’s beauty gone
she stumbles
to the underworld for some
melancholy beauty
a goddess keepsPsyche’s chores
have always been
impossible Can we listen to the gods
who have forbidden us this knowledge?
ROUND
Past crumbling structures one only needs to
hear the song,
music of another’s proof or sense of love
Father, your poem makes me feel like
holding my head over a well
to see water
to be drawn
I heard you make yourself, once,
then over and over again
The water singers know you
Inside their song
thought is repaired
Melody is time, the eternal without fragment
Music Father sings
The meadow opens
to the dance’s circle
In ecstatic orderliness the dance to its themes returns
yet reading
The Life of Father I become infected
by Denise Levertov’s cause of death,
her need
to crank the switch
of transformation, his need
to prevent hers.
Music never wishes
to break from building itself
in requisite alteration Life terrifies, but music stabilizes
(disruption, built in)
In hearing his song
father becomes non-other We have picked up the measure and dance
his word in time
STAFF
In a lower level of river
I found my home in an answer
Granted and extended
entry the forbidden fragmentation
of myself where I dwelled
in music
disintegrates
My home in
molecular pieces Form
in measureless song
within the full range and registers
of song’s
verticality
the earth must be
released
ACTIVITY GARDEN
PARTICULATE GARDEN
GARDEN OF RENUNCIATION
Verse breaks
Fragments fracture, atomically
unmeasured. Everything
continues as song without Semantic Meaning,
THAT THE UTTERANCE OCCURS always is love
The dance’s motion
has stillness at its substrate joining and departing
fusion and fissure I pass out
Dancers carry my body to the middle
for joy’s garden has no tender Here I withdraw
for the sake of the dance
Deep within the world into its silence
Deep within unconscious patterns and passions
Deep within loss nothing revives the fallen one
Inside the dance pink-tinged bright white apple blossoms
smell like apples
A woman’s sleep is protected by rhythmic steps
The dance allows for rest
Her cheek flat on unmown grasses
a mixed lawn of soft herbs and dandelion leaves
strong enough for leaps and turns yet perfumes sleep
In the Garden of Disintegration,
I collapsed, my cellular weakness
No need to stare
upon the sleeping figure, who is one or all humans, alone or
with others The test of eternity is the dance
Her strength failed yet the dancers enclose her in their circle
Until “eternal arrest” Father every time recovers his faltering
Human human us to the soil
of the dance Ashes,
the round reminds us
Father’s longing precedes his creating
Only our psyches
have been allowed
eternal company
in the darkness
His poems remain as tracts of navigation
for us whose bodies
do not even possess
the strength of syllables