Bending the Bow

By Robert Duncan 1919–1988 Robert Duncan

We’ve our business to attend Day’s duties,

bend back the bow in dreams as we may

til the end rimes in the taut string

with the sending. Reveries are rivers and flow

where the cold light gleams reflecting the window upon the

surface of the table,

the presst-glass creamer, the pewter sugar bowl, the litter

of coffee cups and saucers,

carnations painted growing upon whose surfaces. The whole

composition of surfaces leads into the other

current disturbing

what I would take hold of. I’d been

in the course of a letter—I am still

in the course of a letter—to a friend,

who comes close in to my thought so that

the day is hers. My hand writing here

there shakes in the currents of . . . of air?

of an inner anticipation of . . . ? reaching to touch

ghostly exhilarations in the thought of her.

At the extremity of this

design

“there is a connexion working in both directions, as in

the bow and the lyre”—

only in that swift fulfillment of the wish

that sleep

can illustrate my hand

sweeps the string.

You stand behind where-I-am.

The deep tones and shadows I will call a woman.

The quick high notes . . . You are a girl there too,

having something of sister and of wife,

inconsolate,

and I would play Orpheus for you again,

recall the arrow or song,

to the trembling daylight

from which it sprang.

Robert Duncan, "Bending the Bow" 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, . . .

Continue reading this biography