Such Is the Sickness of Many a Good Thing

Was he then Adam of the Burning Way?
hid away in the heat like wrath
      conceald in Love’s face,
or the seed, Eris in Eros,   
      key and lock
of what I was?      I could not speak
      the releasing
word.      For into a dark   
      matter he came
and askt me to say what
      I could not say.      “I ..”

All the flame in me stopt
      against my tongue.
My heart was a stone, a dumb
      unmanageable thing in me,
a darkness that stood athwart   
      his need
for the enlightening, the
      “I love you” that has   
only this one quick in time,
      this one start
when its moment is true.

Such is the sickness of many a good thing   
that now into my life from long ago this   
refusing to say I love you has bound   
the weeping, the yielding, the
      yearning to be taken again,
into a knot, a waiting, a string

so taut it taunts the song,
it resists the touch. It grows dark   
to draw down the lover’s hand   
from its lightness to what’s
      underground.

Copyright Credit: Robert Duncan, “Such Is the Sickness of Many a Good Thing” from Bending the Bow. Copyright © by Robert Duncan. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.
Source: Bending the Bow (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1968)