Here I Go: Three sections from ‘Here I Go’, 1999–2002

<div>[para. 1]: "“Now as then I lose myself in words above my head,” Robert Duncan wrote in <em>Ground Work II</em>, “in following words naked of meaning, as I was in the beginning, hearing the magic voice beyond my sight, out of sight, puts on and removes faces not meant for me” (20). In summer 1999 I began reading of Egyptian fetish and myth. Stories of Isis, Osiris and hermetic Thoth cohered for me, and their themes merged through other reading, as I submerged under a current of old religion. Even in Harry Smith’s <em>Anthology of American Folk Music</em> I heard trace themes of that past. Robert Duncan seemed an embodiment of this magic. His incantations took the spoken form of the seeker, revealing with instantaneous reaches forward the voices in him. “They are mouthing each other in the passages between words and I hear the sound of sucking, the holding of breath and the releasing of breath in vowels I will yet come to from — the labials, the nasals, the fricatives. I will yet come to. Behind the mouth an intent to speak to me returns again and again to the same patterns and urgencies. The same hooves the tread of feet moving through sentences in phrases, the verges of time, of march and mazurka. It is 1921, remember. Someone has let loose the tango. The seed of the mind to be is in a lull a bye bye that comes round to say good bye again.”"<br>  </div>