Styx

By Robert Duncan 1919–1988 Robert Duncan

And a tenth part of Okeanos is given to dark night

a tithe of the pure water under earth

so that the clear fountains pour from rock face,

tears stream from the caverns and clefts,

down-running, carving woundrous ways in basalt resistance,

cutting deep as they go into layers of time-layerd

Gaia where She sleeps—

the cold water, the black rushing gleam, the

moving down-rush, wash, gush out over

bed-rock, toiling the boulders in flood,

purling in deeps, broad flashing in falls—

And a tenth part of bright clear Okeanos

his circulations— mists, rains, sheets, sheathes—

lies in poisonous depths, the black water.

Styx this carver of caverns beneath us is.

Styx this black water, this down-pouring.

The well is deep. From its stillness

the words our voices speak echo.

Resonance follows resonance.

Waves of this sounding come up to us.

We draw the black water, pure and cold.

The light of day is not as bright

as this crystal flowing.

Three thousand years we have recited its virtue

out of Hesiod.

Is it twenty-five thousand

since the ice withdrew from the lands and we

came forth from the realm of caverns where

the river beneath the earth we knew

we go back to.

Styx pouring down in the spring from its glacial remove,

from the black ice.

Fifty million years—from the beginning of what we are—

we knew the depth of this well to be.

Fifty million years deep —but our knowing deepens

—time deepens—

this still water

we thirst for in dreams we dread.

Source: Ground Work II: In the Dark (1987)

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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