Maintains. (via Silliman)


    ”Doves

      1

Mother of mouthings,
the grey doves in your many branches
code and decode what warnings
we call recall of love’s watery tones?

   hurrrrrr
   harrrrrr
   hurrr .

She raises the bedroom window
to let in the air and pearl-grey
   light of morning
where the first world stript of its names extends,
where initial things go,
beckoning dove-sounds recur
   taking what we know of them

from the soul leaps to the tongue’s tip
   as if to tell
      what secret
in the word for it.

      2

The bird claws scraping the ledges.
I hear the rustling of wings. Is it evening?
The woodwinds chortling or piping,
sounds settling down in the dark pit where the orchestra lights glow
as the curtain rises, and in the living room,
as another stage,
lamps are lit.

      3

  The lady in the shade of the boughs
  held a dove in her two hands,
  let it fly up from the bowl she made
  as if a word had left her lips.

  Now that the song has flown
  the tree shakes, rustling in the wind,
  with no stars of its own,
  for all the nets of words are gone.

  The lady holds nothing in her two hands
  cupt. The catches of the years are torn.
  And the wood-light floods and overflows
  the bowl she holds like a question.

  Voices of children from playgrounds come
  sounding on the wind without names.
  We cannot tell who they are there
  we once were too under what star?

  Before words, after words . hands
  lifted as a bowl for water, alms or prayer.
  For what we heard was no more than a dove’s

   hurrrrrr
   harrrrrr
   hurrr

      where the Day slept
  after noon, in the light’s blur and shade
  the Queen of the Tree’s Talking
  hears only the leaf sound,
  whirrr of wings in the boughs,

  the voices in the wind verging into leaf sound.

      4

I wanted to say something,
that my heart had such a burden,
or needed a burden in order to say something.

Take what mask to find words
and as an old man come forward
into a speech he had long waited for,

had on the tip of his tongue,
from which now . O fateful thread!
Sentence that thru my song most moved!

Now from your courses the flame has fled
making but words of what I loved.”

--Rob*rt Duncan, Roots and Branch*s (1964)



J*richo.


On my victrola: Clust*r- Gross*s Wass*r.