The Uncreating Chaos

(Double Portrait in a Mirror) I To the meeting despair of eyes in the street, offer Your eyes on plates and your liver on skewers of pity. When the Jericho sky is heaped with clouds which the sun Trumpets above, respond to Apocalypse With a headache. In spirit follow The young men to the war, up Everest. Be shot. For the uncreating chaos Claims you in marriage: though a man, you were ever a bride. Ever among the supple surface of summer-brown muscle The fountaining evening chatter under the stars, The student who chucks back his forelock in front of a glass, You only longed for your longing to last. The engine in you, anxiety, Is a grave lecher, a globe-trotter, one With moods of straw, the winds that blow him, aeroplanes. 'Whatever happens, I shall never be alone, I shall always have a fare, an affair, or a revolution.' II I am so close to you I will confess to you I am all that you do. In thoughts where pity is the same as cruelty Your life is mine. Whether What fears and falters is myself Or yourself — all The apprehension of this time, We are both one. At night I'm flooded by the future Incoming tide of the unharnessed war. Beyond the blacked-out windows of our nightmare Facts race their hundred miles an hour In iron circles on an iron plain. The riders of those race-cars lose All sense of where they are. Ridden by their speed, the men Are their machines. III All I can foresee now — more I shall learn — Is that our fear creates its opposite. Our peace is war. When you choose a mirror for a lover It shows you your own image as a gunman. You are a ghost amid the flares of shellfire Less living than The last war dead whose veins of mineral We mine for here. IV Shall I ever reach The field enclosed by stones In the high mountains Where the scytheless wind Flushes the swayed grasses? Where clouds without rain Add to the sun Their mirroring shine? The simple machinery is here Clear room clear day clear desk And the hand with its power To make the heart pour Into the word, as the sun Moves upward through the corn. Meanwhile, where nothing's sacred And love no longer willed Nor our true purpose conscious, Holy is lucidity And the mind that dare explain.