Though the name Robert Duncan is not well known outside the literary world, within that world it has become associated with a number of superlatives. Kenneth Rexroth, writing in Assays, names Duncan “one of the most accomplished, one of the most influential” of the postwar American poets.

I know a little language of my cat, though Dante says

that animals have no need of speech and Nature

abhors the superfluous.   My cat is fluent.   He

converses when he wants with me.   To speak

is natural.   And whales and wolves I’ve heard

in choral soundings of the sea and air

know harmony and have an eloquence that stirs

my mind and heart—they touch the soul.   Here

Dante’s religion that would set Man apart

damns the effluence of our life from us

to build therein its powerhouse.

It’s in his animal communication Man is

true, immediate, and

in immediacy, Man is all animal.

His senses quicken in the thick of the symphony,

old circuits of animal rapture and alarm,

attentions and arousals in which an identity rearrives.

He hears

particular voices among

the concert, the slightest

rustle in the undertones,

rehearsing a nervous aptitude

yet to prove his. He sees the flick

of significant red within the rushing mass

of ruddy wilderness and catches the glow

of a green shirt

to delite him in a glowing field of green

—it speaks to him—

and in the arc of the spectrum color

speaks to color.

The rainbow articulates

a promise he remembers

he but imitates

in noises that he makes,

this speech in every sense

the world surrounding him.

He picks up on the fugitive tang of mace

amidst the savory mass,

and taste in evolution is an everlasting key.

There is a pun of scents in what makes sense.

Myrrh it may have been,

the odor of the announcement that filld the house.

He wakes from deepest sleep

upon a distant signal and waits

as if crouching, springs

to life.

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