We've our business to attend Day's duties, <br />bend back the bow in dreams as we may <br />til the end rimes in the taut string <br />with the sending. Reveries are rivers and flow <br />where the cold light gleams reflecting the window upon the <br />surface of the table, <br />the presst-glass creamer, the pewter sugar bowl, the litter <br />of coffee cups and saucers, <br />carnations painted growing upon whose surfaces. The whole <br />composition of surfaces leads into the other <br />current disturbing <br />what I would take hold of. I'd been <br /> <br />in the course of a letter – I am still <br />in the course of a letter – to a friend, <br />who comes close in to my thought so that <br />the day is hers. My hand writing here <br />there shakes in the currents of... of air? <br />of an inner anticipation of...? reaching to touch <br />ghostly exhilarations in the thought of her. <br /> <br />At the extremity of this <br />design <br />'there is a connexion working in both directions, as in <br />the bow and the lyre'– <br />only in that swift fulfillment of the wish <br />that sleep <br />can illustrate my hand <br />sweeps the string. <br /> <br />You stand behind the where-I-am. <br />The deep tones and shadows I will call a woman. <br />The quick high notes... You are a girl there too, <br />having something of sister and of wife, <br />inconsolate, <br />and I would play Orpheus for you again, <br /> <br />recall the arrow or song <br />to the trembling daylight <br />from which it sprang.<br /><br />Robert Duncan<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/bending-the-bow/
