A poem always runs the risk of being meaningless, and would be nothing without this risk.... --Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference 74 Is the root charge of poetry a power to partake of a Gnostic version of things, catastrophic events wherein we know truth by its downward turn? --Nathaniel Mackey, Paracritical Hinge 135 Confronted with Robert Duncan's last two volumes of poetry, Ground Work: Before the War (1984) and Ground Work II: In the Dark (1987), serious readers of his oeuvre face a troubling situation, which some may be reluctant to acknowledge: Ground Work represents what appears to be a significant transformation in Duncan's verse and perhaps a decline in its lyric qualities. This is not to say that these books are failures: there are individual poems and even sequences in both volumes that are as compelling and rhapsodic as anything he wrote earlier. But something strange seems to be happening in the last phases of his work, especially when one recalls how he dramatically refused to publish any new poems for 15 years, from about 1968 (when Bending the Bow came out) to 1984, saving this accumulation until he felt the time was right for its appearance. What, we may rightfully ask, is happening in Duncan's poetry from the period of Bending the Bow to his death in 1988? An unmaking or a passage beyond the bounds even of open-form poetry, combined with a shift in what was previously the poet's centering sense of prophetic vocation, results in an unprecedented kind of writing that no longer seems to be lyric poetry in any conventional sense of the term. It is this writing--this scripture--that I hope to describe and account for here. (1) We prefer to think of great poets (and there is no question in my mind that Duncan is a great poet) as growing ever stronger and more determined in their utterances, but we know that this is not always the case. Emerging from a visionary tradition of the sublime, Duncan, more than any other American poet in the second half of the twentieth century, successfully synthesizes romantic and modernist modes of poetic discourse to produce what he terms a grand collage (Bending the Bow vii) of uncanny beauty and mystery. Duncan is a religious poet: for him, the prophetic poet inherits from the religious and philosophical traditions of the past all that is necessary to bring spiritual insight or gnosis (which includes a renewed understanding of the social and political conditions of history and of one's own time) to his readers. In The Truth and Life of Myth, perhaps his greatest testament, Duncan gives witness to a Creation by Creative Will that realizes Itself in Form evolving in the play of primordial patterns (Fictive Certainties 34). Yet always in this work, as in his other prose, what I speak of here in the terms of a theology is a poetics. Back of each poet's concept of the poem is his concept of the meaning of itself; and his concept of in turn where it is serious at all arises from his concept of the nature of the universe, its lifetime or form, or even, for some, its lifelessness or formlessness. (16) Duncan's own concept of derives from a syncretic theosophical tradition that includes Neoplatonism, Christian and Jewish kabbalism, and gnosticism, all of which share an emanational vision of creation. Yet at the same time, this tradition leads to a vision of decreation too: Chaos, the Yawning Abyss, is First Person of Form. And the Poet too, like the Son, in this myth of Love or Form, must go deep into the reality of His own Nature, into the Fathering Chaos or Wrath, to suffer His own Nature. In this mystery of the art, the Son's cry to the Father might be too the cry of the artist to the he obeys. (Fictive Certainties 15-16) This suffering of the Son as he returns into the Chaos of the Father is fundamental to an understanding of Duncan's later poetry, for in this work, the form-making poet, the devotee of Eros whose power brings forth the form of forms (Fictive Certainties 38), must confront the fathering formlessness of the Abyss that has paradoxically served as the hidden ground of his earlier achievements. …