Transgressing the Real (Passages 27)

By Robert Duncan 1919–1988 Robert Duncan

In the War they made a celestial cave.

In the War now I make

a celestial cave, a tent of the Night

(the Sun, no longer striking day upon the Earth,

but light-years away a diamond spark in the host of stars

sparkling net bejewelld wave of dark over us

distant coruscations

“play of light or of intellectual brilliancy”

in which I pretend a convocation of powers

(under the cloak of his poem he retires

invisible

so that it seems no man but a world speaks

for my thoughts are servants of the stars, and my words

(all parentheses opening into

come from a mouth that is the Universe la bouche d’ombre

(The poet-magician Dr Dee in his black mirror

calls forth his spirits from their obscurity)

thru the rays of invisible and visible bodies,

known and unknown sources and senders,

thru fumes, lights, sounds, crystallizations . . .

For now in my mind all the young men of my time

have withdrawn allegiance from this world, from public things ·

and as their studies in irreality deepen,

industries, businesses, universities, armies

shudder and cease

so that the stone that comes into being

when the pupil of the eye that like a moon

takes all seeing from an unseen sun’s light

reflected makes

held under his tongue each man speak

wonders to come.

Chaos / and the divine measures and orders

so wedded are

we have but to imagine

ourselves the Lover

and the Beloved appears

man and woman, child and king, the ages and ladders of being,

the labor of birth and the release of death so compounded therein

they draw from the War Itself withdrawing

this breath between them.

In this rite the Great Magician stirs in His dream,

and the magician dreaming murmurs to his beloved:

thou art so near to me

thou art a phantom that the heart

would see—

and now the great river of their feeling grows so wide

its shores grow distant and unreal.

Robert Duncan, "Transgressing the Real (Passages 27)" from Bending the Bow. Copyright © by Robert Duncan. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Source: Bending the Bow (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 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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