breathedout | "A Poem Beginning with a Line from Pindar" (Reply)

The light foot hears you and the brightness begins
god-step at the margins of thought,
     quick adulterous tread at the heart.
Who is it that goes there?
     Where I see your quick face
notes of an old music pace the air,
torso-reverberations of a Grecian lyre.

In Goya’s canvas Cupid and Psyche
have a hurt voluptuous grace
bruised by redemption. The copper light
falling upon the brown boy’s slight body
is carnal fate that sends the soul wailing
up from blind innocence, ensnared
     by dimness
into the deprivations of desiring sight.

But the eyes in Goya’s painting are soft,
diffuse with rapture absorb the flame.
Their bodies yield out of strength.
     Waves of visual pleasure
wrap them in a sorrow previous to their impatience.

A bronze of yearning, a rose that burns
     the tips of their bodies, lips,
ends of fingers, nipples. He is not wingd.
His thighs are flesh, are clouds
     lit by the sun in its going down,
hot luminescence at the loins of the visible.
     But they are not in a landscape.
     They exist in an obscurity.
The wind spreading the sail serves them.
The two jealous sisters eager for her ruin
     serve them.
That she is ignorant, ignorant of what Love will be,
     serves them.
The dark serves them.
The oil scalding his shoulder serves them,
serves their story. Fate, spinning,
     knots the threads for Love.

Jealousy, ignorance, the hurt … serve them.

—Robert Duncan, "A Poem Beginning with a Line from Pindar"

I am sort of idly searching poetic annals for a title for this Paris story, and while for various reasons I don’t think this Duncan poem is really suitable, the language sure is chewy enough for dinner, coffee, and a cigarette after. This is only the first section; do click through for the whole thing.