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.
...

My mother would be a falconress,
And I, her gay falcon treading her wrist,
would fly to bring back
from the blue of the sky to her, bleeding, a prize,
...

The man with his lion under the shed of wars
sheds his belief as if he shed tears.
The sound of words waits -
a barbarian host at the borderline of sense.
...

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made place,

that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
...

Neither our vices nor our virtues
further the poem. “They came up
and died
just like they do every year
...

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
...

In the groves of Africa from their natural wonder
the wildebeest, zebra, the okapi, the elephant,
...

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,
...

It’s in the perilous boughs of the tree
out of blue sky the wind
sings loudest surrounding me.
...

I know a little language of my cat, though Dante says
that animals have no need of speech and Nature
...

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,
...

The white peacock roosting
might have been Christ,
...

Something is taking place.
Horns thrust upward from the brow.
Hooves beat impatient where feet once were.
...

The light foot hears you and the brightness begins
god-step at the margins of thought,
...