Duende, The

I was privy to oily fungus and the algae of

standing waters;

Honored, on my return, by the ancient

fellowship of rotten stems.

I was pure as a worm on a leaf; I cherished

the mold's children.

I slept like an insect.

(from "Unfold! Unfold!")

Roethke's duende was palpable whenever he welcomed the visceral thingy spirits into his work, or proclaimed a condition of pure joy, or channeled his madness by struggling to write poems in the shape of the psyche itself. There was something Lawrencean in his quest. As he put it in a notebook entry: "For Lawrence and I are going the same way: down:/ A loosening into the dark."

I still find consolation in the idea that the dark night of the soul is the duende's special province. Lorca declares, "the muse of Gongora and the angel of Garcilaso must let go of their laurel garlands when the duende of St. John of the Cross comes by." St. John's subject was spiritual negation and mystical union, the self alarmed and abandoned utterly, so desolate, so desperate in its crying out, so abject in its need for a savior that it signals a transfiguration. We are moving into the realm of the self lost and found and lost again, the realm of the sacred. The dark night is a holy hour when the spirit comes to him as an erotic visitation, a saving grace, a sovereign hand that wounds. He is filled and emptied out. Here are the conclusive three stanzas of "Dark Night" in Frank Bidart's spirited rendition:

As he lay sleeping on my sleepless

breast, kept from the beginning for him

alone, lying on the gift I gave

as the restless

fragrant cedars moved the restless winds,

winds from the circling parapet circling

us as I lay there touching and lifting his hair,

with his sovereign hand, he

wounded my neck

and my senses, when they touched that,

touched nothing...

In a dark night (there where I

lost myself,-) as I leaned to rest

in his smooth white breast, everything

ceased

and left me, forgotten in the grave of

forgotten lilies.

The duende fevers dreams that spill over into incantations, into waking spells. It favors nocturnes of sleeplessness-the cry of the solitary and the bereft ensouled in poetic form. It favors the urgent reveries and warnings of the night mind. I'm moved, for example, by the way that Marina Tsvetaeva calls out to be inhabited by something like the demonic spirit of duende in her restless tenpart poem "Insomnia" (I6). She pleads to be liberated from the bonds of day and throws open her doors wide into the night, eagerly relinquishing her social self in order to be inhabited by something stranger and more mysterious ("and people think perhaps I'm a daughter or wife/ but in my mind is one thought only: night"). Each of the poems in the sequence is written in a different form, thus giving an ever-changing shape to her solitary warnings ("Don't sleep! Be firm! Listen, the alternative/ is-everlasting sleep"). Here are the four couplets that comprise section 8:

Black as-the centre of an eye, the centre,

a blackness

That sucks at light. I love your vigilance