Robert Duncan: Salvages: An Evening Piece

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A plate in light upon a table is not a plate of hunger. Coins on the table have their own innocent glimmer. Everything about coins we obliterate in use and urgency. How lovely the silver dull disk glimmer is. Shells without remorse. The rubd antique nickle dated 1939 Liberty portrait relief of Jefferson and, beyond, darkend with use, a grimy patina beautiful 1929 buffalo head nickle.

Bottles. An aluminum tea pot with wicker handle. A remnant length of Italian shawl worn by my grandmother in the 80s, this too, increasing as beauty in dimness. The reds, ochres, blacks and once perhaps almost white natural cotton yellowd. The wearing, the long use, the discoloring. It would be becoming to beauty in words worn out. As a poetry to be discolord.

It is not the age it is the wearing, it is the reversion of the thing from its values. One nickle, then two dimes brighter, a newness, fresh-minted (yet, when I look -- in god we trust -- it is 1944, the god is Mercury with winged helmet; the other, a bust of Deus Roosevelt roman style with sagging chin and stuck-up defiant nondescript head -- this is 1947 -- in god we trust). Then two nickles, the grimy ones. One shiny fifty cent piece above. (Beyond) a fourth nickle showing Monticello E Pluribus Unum.

This mere ninety cents is more, is all piece by piece in art, as they are here, pieces of glimmer as rare as the mysterious chalice with faces and figures on the casting from the greek house and rider.

Notes on use and values.

.....Then the litter. The gleams of silver and nickle seen as coins of light in the litter. A key, another gleam, an ancient evocation, a coin-silver spoon, a chipt cheap cup-shaped cup with a grey glaze without the imperfections of beauty beautiful because it is a cup. A large brown glass bottle of vitamins that look like beans. Papers. A letter from a friend, a program in my own script black and definite (defiant) arranged over the white paper. Matches. An envelope.

In the late hour left after the history of the day, taken with a will before bedtime -- how transformd the world is! The silence almost reaches us in which an original, all that has been left behind, tosst about, of us remains.

Beautiful litter with thy gleam and glimmers, thy wastes and remains! The tide of our purpose has gone back into itself, into its own counsels. And it is the beauty of where we have been living that is the beauty of the hour.

This post dedicated to Aram Saroyan

Salvages: An Evening Piece: Robert Duncan, 1950 (from A Book of Resemblances, 1950-1953)

Indian Head nickel (obverse): designed by James Earle Fraser, 1913: image by Einar Einarsson Kvaran, 2005

Buffalo Head nickel (reverse): designed and by James Earle Fraser, 1913: image by Einar Einarsson Kvaran, 2005

Composite image of 1936 Winged Liberty Head (Mercury) dime, designed by Adolph A. Weinman, 1915 (obverse image based on portrait of Wallace Stevens's wife Elsie Kachel Stevens): original obverse image by Bobby 131313, 2006; composite image by Cholmes75, 2006

WW II period US Liberty Head nickel (Monticello/reverse side), designed and engraved by Felix Schlag,1938: image by Cholmes75, 2006

House key: photo by Linuxerist, 2006
Spoon: photo by Ari Abitbol, 2008
Street Item: Garbage, Berkeley: photo by Dorothea Lange, 1945 (Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California)