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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.

-Robert Duncan, 1960