ROBERT DUNCAN ~

Roots and Branches


      Sail, Monarchs, rising and falling

orange merchants in spring's flowery markets!

messengers of March in warm currents of news floating,

      flitting into areas of aroma.

tracing out of air unseen roots and branches of sense

      I share in thought,

filaments woven and broken where the world might light

      casual certainties of me. There are



      echoes of what I am in what you perform

this morning. How you perfect my spirit!

      almost restore

an imaginary tree of the living in all its doctrines

      by fluttering about,

intent and easy as you are, the profusion of you!

awakening transports of an inner view of things.



__________________
Robert Duncan
The Collected Later Poems and Plays
edited with an introduction by Peter Quartermain
U Cal Press, 2019



Put your good hands into the good hands of Peter Quartermain's
guidance through the later world of Duncan, fertile ground

ROBERT DUNCAN ~

ROBERT DUNCAN & JOHN WIENERS ~

ROBERT DUNCAN & JOHN WIENERS ~

PERMISSION ~

If you've kept up with my recent three essays on the Birdhouse, it has attempted to describe, sometimes with redundancy (cohesion comes strange), what has been happening around here, of late, with our back road and one troubling spot with one troubling family. There are a few outer satellites of people who have contributed by way of their private animosity and contempt, which has perked up and burped up and flubbed as they try to make something out of nothing, while a small but determined police force takes a look around. If you've got nothing to hide, you got nothing to worry about. The law says they are looking for the truth. So give them some. A police force in the woods is only as good as its leadership and assistance.


For ourselves, the police's presence has forced some of our neighbors to wake up, finally, to how they have been manipulated and duped, by a desperate individual (and perhaps associates?), and to maybe see what damage and heartache it has done to others, which may soon include themselves.


Speaking for myself, as a neighbor, and husband to the victim (Susan), I don't take any of this lightly. One wise old friend of ours, from far off, advises, "Hold your cards close." Nope, not this time. I mention no names, and won't, ever, it isn't my place, and I respect everyone's privacy, but I will zero in and nail down and sleep with you, if I have to, without touching, just to show what injustice and cruelness won't be allowed, to get to the bottom of this because, no one hurts the one I love. Woman, or earth.


When there were "19 witnesses", all bogus — because there were no "19 witnesses" within miles or ear shot of the altercation of this woman onto Susan on the day it happened — I watched Susan spiral and sadden into a deepness, which isn't good, at what had happened to this woodlands and river she loves. Her home. Nothing was making sense.


So it was time to make sense, real sense, not by simply watching lawmakers set up for their catch, but to enlist true spirits and doers and activists and workers and writers and educators and so many of them beautiful friends, to say a word or two as a character testimonial, at whatever their chosen length, for Susan. For fellowship. Believe me, everyone who has contributed: you are beautiful, and I know you have a very good idea what your contribution and precise timing has made for us right now.


It isn't enough to watch the lawmakers excel at their duties and diligence, often fitted into play by strict authority, intimidation, and shocking and obliging good manners. It's everything and blueberry pancakes to see people — the you's and me's — stop a moment and draw up from our pockets a skill at showing such enduring brotherhood. Thank you, every one of you. I hope this road I live on will one day wake up and see and feel and show they could be made of the same moxie as all of you.


And before these words were out of my mouth, some neighbors showed us this very thing. Just the other day, and this is how —

you know the folks I have often described as those using "fireworks"? Well, this morning they called us up and asked for a meeting. . .as soon as possible. They, of course, are not the troublemakers, but folks who seem confused and caught in the crossfire of bad acts and worse results. They wanted to come clean. Good friends had just left after a lovely day and overnight visit with us, and this visit was a blessing since it had been a long time in the making, and allowed a certain dark passage of time (the trouble here) to get shook and poked at and maybe broke open. I can't tell you how, I can only tell you I felt something. It was the start of maybe something better and better, maybe even a buckling to the crap, and a re-awakening for many involved.


We walked over to our neighbors, by sunshine, then into our woodlot, on a narrow path, out of the trees and onto their driveway and up to their kitchen door where we were welcomed inside into an immediate apology of profuse and genuine explanations. Followed by their questions and a vigorous conversation, minted by deep mugs of tea. This meant they wished for us to stay. Wished to get things off their chests and likewise take on some solid facts. We gave them the facts. Then we were shown all the home, upstairs and down, many of the rooms were private, and we were being welcomed. It was a thorough and remarkable repentance, with a generosity as if they were doing it from themselves, plus a world incapable. We could only feel calm and calmer.


Little did they know, and why should they? when they showed us one room, it was the very room I held a dying friend with cancer twenty-five years ago, as I helped move him down the hallway from there to the bathroom. I hadn't been in the bedroom or on these blond varnished floors since. Little did they know, or did I, when we returned to our home from this house would we find a phone message from his widow saying today was the anniversary of his passing. And my wife and I haven't heard from her since the cow jumped over the moon. While a half hour before, I was standing in the room where my friend expired. I don't need anyone to tell me it was my dying friend who brought us back to his house today via these lovely new neighbors, his calling widow, his guiding hand. My old friend doesn't like seeing what he is seeing. My old dying friend, as when alive, is trying to help us where he can. Help the new neighbors where he can. My old dying friend would never be called a ghost, but more a guardian angel. I could never call him dead.


Sometime, in the afternoon, looking at one another, it made Susan realize and start to cry.


No one should be trapped in a greater hopelessness.


We feel there is a break through — amongst all our friends, the pursuit of some neighbors, the living and dying who will assist. "Often I am permitted to return to a meadow."


Permitted.


Yes indeed.

Robert Duncan


photo © susan arnold
"green river early 70s"

FAVORITES ~

Once In Vermont Films
© bob arnold

SKYDOME ~

Robert Duncan

There are so many ways to say a book is fantastic. Maybe best here to allow the author some space to describe why the night sky (we all have) is fantastic.


~

=================================MARCH 10, FRIDAY. 1961. (1963)

Naming the stars out of the seas of heaven, men drew a net-work. The knots were suns, were burning. What the poets who bound the dragon of their confusion spun were lines of association where figures of light appeared, giving direction. All life is oriented to the light from which life comes. The bees in their dances are oriented to the sun and, if it is dark, will dance in relation to a candle flame. Men found at night a new orientation in the stars, found a heaven, a spreading mesh of lights, that became a projected screen of where and when they were as they danced, an image of another net that in memory we throw out over moment and place that are suns in time, the net of our selves. The bees dance to tell where the honey is.

They memorized as they realized. In turn, now, the surfaces and involvements of the brain were an imprint of the seas above; and the skydome above was the image of another configuration in the skulldome below. So, a network there too bound the dragon of a confusion in constellations of living cells that made up a body or series of imaginary bodies a man was, is, would be.

.

It was a map. It was a great design of where they were and then of when. Night after night here in the country I have been learning my stars. The wavering cold of a mixed winter and spring, as if those distant lights were within the aroma of March blossomings, the lilac, lemon, and grasses, of the star-world, brings a fragrance of stars. Earth sparks of scent seem just to have flown up into those signs of the ancient ways in which the book of when-where sparkles and glows. As we come home from an evening with neighbors, Orion is in the high heaven.

I found my copy, new, uncorrected proof, last fall tucked into the corner of a children's book display at a local bookseller's trade show...as if not quite knowing where to categorize the book. $2, "NOT FOR RESALE". I'm going by the early tatters of this text — affection for my found copy.