Such Is the Sickness of Many a Good Thing

By Robert Duncan 1919–1988 Robert Duncan

Was he then Adam of the Burning Way?

hid away in the heat like wrath

conceald in Love’s face,

or the seed, Eris in Eros,

key and lock

of what I was? I could not speak

the releasing

word. For into a dark

matter he came

and askt me to say what

I could not say. “I ..”

All the flame in me stopt

against my tongue.

My heart was a stone, a dumb

unmanageable thing in me,

a darkness that stood athwart

his need

for the enlightening, the

“I love you” that has

only this one quick in time,

this one start

when its moment is true.

Such is the sickness of many a good thing

that now into my life from long ago this

refusing to say I love you has bound

the weeping, the yielding, the

yearning to be taken again,

into a knot, a waiting, a string

so taut it taunts the song,

it resists the touch. It grows dark

to draw down the lover’s hand

from its lightness to what’s

underground.

Robert Duncan, “Such Is the Sickness of Many a Good Thing” from Bending the Bow. Copyright © by Robert Duncan. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Source: Bending the Bow (1968)

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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