A LOUD LAMENT

               This deep world
Of darkness do we dread?

If there was a future in what is always present,
In the seeming wonder of forgotten streets
Where fluttering refuse and closed doors
Are like echoes striking the still soul
To give it knowledge of its long silence
And of our death further down the street:
If after that dying, these flat facts of the world
Had some end, if the moon’s mysterious light
Could, as it seems to, redeem the dull purpose past
Of the disused canal and the broken lockgate—
A redemption dissolved by the sensible sun—
And if the backstreets of industrial cities
Were more than minor shrines in the dusty apse,
Lost in the gloom behind the major altar,
A present world of little substance
Full of fascination but of no future,
If it all were not just a midnight vision
Before our endless dying in a misty graveyard,
Then I would let loose the sensuous chaos
Of my soul, and in that embodied world
Vent these diverted passions. Your body then
Would be my soul, and I would live delighted
Careless of past and future.

But this present life and all its waste
The many attributes of temporal need,
This inconclusive world is soon swept away,
Nothing but a swell in the middle ocean
A forming wave that will never break
Upon a certain shore. When this our first future
Is found assured only of its emptiness
The slight spirit seems then the solid fact,
Unseen until this first world ends, in death,
And then, a lifetime unattended, it is nothing,
Though in every end the imagination
Might have seen that last and empty end—
When factories closed and jobs were lost
When families grew up and moved apart
When love died and friends were forgotten—
In the recurring sense of lost permanence
We might have begun to see the vacancy
That our lost life leaves, a soul struggling
With darkness, defeated an hour after death.

I get no comfort now from the knowledge
Of your beauty, glowing with desire, at best
Comfort only from the ecstasy creation needs
Unconsolable comfort. Yet passions disembodied
Drive back my soul towards its simple self
Across all the elements that would be involved
In our creating, back to direct desire
In the immediate world, destroying all past
And present attempts to make myself,
And violent images return of desire
Crossed, delayed, avoided—futureless images
That I would forget. What I am prevents
What I would be. And wanting to create
All I can is destroy.