Passage over Water

By Robert Duncan 1919–1988 Robert Duncan

We have gone out in boats upon the sea at night,

lost, and the vast waters close traps of fear about us.

The boats are driven apart, and we are alone at last

under the incalculable sky, listless, diseased with stars.

Let the oars be idle, my love, and forget at this time

our love like a knife between us

defining the boundaries that we can never cross

nor destroy as we drift into the heart of our dream,

cutting the silence, slyly, the bitter rain in our mouths

and the dark wound closed in behind us.

Forget depth-bombs, death and promises we made,

gardens laid waste, and, over the wastelands westward,

the rooms where we had come together bombd.

But even as we leave, your love turns back. I feel

your absence like the ringing of bells silenced. And salt

over your eyes and the scales of salt between us. Now,

you pass with ease into the destructive world.

There is a dry crash of cement. The light fails,

falls into the ruins of cities upon the distant shore

and within the indestructible night I am alone.

Source: Selected Poems (1950)

Biography

Described by Kenneth Rexroth as “one of the most accomplished, one of the most influential” of the postwar American poets, Robert Duncan was an important part of both the Black Mountain school of poetry, led by Charles Olson, and the San Francisco Renaissance, whose other members included poets Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser. A distinctive voice in American poetry, Duncan’s idiosyncratic poetics drew on myth, occultism, . . .

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