Neither our vices nor our virtues <br />further the poem. “They came up <br />and died <br />just like they do every year <br />on the rocks.” <br /> <br />The poem <br />feeds upon thought, feeling, impulse, <br />to breed itself, <br />a spiritual urgency at the dark ladders leaping. <br /> <br />This beauty is an inner persistence <br />toward the source <br />striving against (within) down-rushet of the river, <br />a call we heard and answer <br />in the lateness of the world <br />primordial bellowings <br />from which the youngest world might spring, <br /> <br />salmon not in the well where the <br />hazelnut falls <br />but at the falls battling, inarticulate, <br />blindly making it. <br /> <br />This is one picture apt for the mind. <br />A second: a moose painted by Stubbs, <br />where last year’s extravagant antlers <br />lie on the ground. <br />The forlorn moosey-faced poem wears <br />new antler-buds, <br />the same, <br /> <br />“a little heavy, a little contrived”, <br />his only beauty to be <br />all moose.<br /><br />Robert Duncan<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/poetry-a-natural-thing/
