Poetry, A Natural Thing
by Robert Duncan

Neither our vices nor our virtues
further the poem. "They came up

and died
just like they do every year

on the rocks."

The poem
feeds upon thought, feeling, impulse,

to breed itself,
a spiritual urgency at the dark ladders leaping.

This beauty is an inner persistence

toward the source
striving against (within) down-rushet of the river,

a call we heard and answer
in the lateness of the world

primordial bellowings
from which the youngest world might spring,

salmon not in the well where the

hazelnut falls
but at the falls battling, inarticulate,

blindly making it.

This is one picture apt for the mind.

A second: a moose painted by Stubbs,
where last year's extravagant antlers

lie on the ground.
The forlorn moosey-faced poem wears

new antler-buds,

the same,

"a little heavy, a little contrived",

his only beauty, to be

all moose.