Fire he sang, that trees fear, and I, a tree, rejoiced in its flames. New buds broke forth from me though it was full summer. As though his lyre (now… - Denise Levertov

He quotes Ezra Pound saying in a 1948 manifesto, “You must understand what is happening”; and makes it clear the significant emphasis is on “what is happening,” the presentness, the process. “Most verse,” Duncan comments, “is something being made up to communicate a thing already present in the mind — or a lot of it is. And don’t pay the attention it shld to what the poet don’t know — and won’t [know] until the process speaks.

Just when you seem to yourself nothing but a flimsy web of questions, you are given the questions of others to hold in the emptiness of your hands, songbird eggs that can still hatch if you keep them warm, butterflies opening and closing themselves in your cupped palms, trusting you not to injure their scintillant fur, their dust. You are given the questions of others as if they were answers to all you ask. Yes, perhaps this gift is your answer.

I am so small, a speck of dust moving across the huge world. The
world a speck of dust in the universe.

Are you holding the universe? You hold onto my smallness. How do you grasp it,
how does it not
slip away?

I know so little.

You have brought me so far.