United States, (1919-1988)
MOLY
- It is said that there in Her house you
- are not fair but,
- cowering or covering, go down
- into the beast’s way, such is
- the sorcery of Her song.
- The voice we raise in poetry
- so that it seems lovely to be enthralld
- by words and truth
- to be in soaring numbers and in rimes
- thickens and
- goes down into the throat,
- gagging, rooting in the grass,
- fertilities of sound,
- snuffling, snorting, snared in a
- delirium of snout and watering mouth
- incapable of speech,
- all animal tongue and panting breath, the lungs
- sucking the psychedelic air.
- So that I fear for you even as I seek
- you out. Your eyes alone
- plead, almost speak to me. “But I
- seek out a plant I need,” you say,
- “This is the meaning of my greed.”
- Dear Beast, dear dumb illiterate
- Underbeing of Man, where
- violence at last comes home riding
- the piggish meat, where he will stumble
- on all fours, go down, and groan,
- enthralld by Circe’s wine, toucht
- by her wand toward that trans-
- substantiation where food, His Body,
- becometh swill, and wine
- drags down the spirit to Her will.
- Still in that dream I in the depths of
- my sleeping self return to,
- I find you wait in the mind my mind
- verges upon. Your eyes
- waking from our daily blindness to see
- in that nor day nor night-time light
- turnd on in dreams I warily
- remember—there,
- I bring, as if it were myself you need, the weed
- called Moly.
About the Poet
Robert Duncan (1919-1988) was a U.S. poet and a student of H.D. and the Western esoteric tradition who spent most of his career in and around San Francisco. Though associated with any number of literary traditions and schools, Duncan is often identified with the poets of the New American Poetry and Black Mountain College. Duncan’s mature work emerged in the 1950s in the literary context of Beat culture. Duncan was a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance.
Not only a difficult poet, but also a public intellectual Duncan’s presence was felt across many facets of popular culture. Duncan’s name is prominent in the history of pre-Stonewall gay culture and in the emergence of bohemian socialist communities of the 1930s and 40s, in the Beat Generation, and also in the cultural and political upheaval of the 1960s, influencing occult and gnostic circles of the time. [from wikipedia.org, DES-11/10]