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Nothing seems to have changed much.
Life at War
The disasters numb within us caught in the chest, rolling in the brain like pebbles. The feeling resembles lumps of raw dough
weighing down a child's stomach on baking day. Or Rilke said it, 'My heart. . . Could I say of it, it overflows with bitterness . . . but no, as though
its contents were simply balled into formless lumps, thus do I carry it about.' The same war
continues. We have breathed the grits of it in, all our lives, our lungs are pocked with it, the mucous membrane of our dreams coated with it, the imagination filmed over with the gray filth of it:
the knowledge that humankind,
delicate Man, whose flesh responds to a caress, whose eyes are flowers that perceive the stars,
whose music excels the music of birds, whose laughter matches the laughter of dogs, whose understanding manifests designs fairer than the spider's most intricate web,
still turns without surprise, with mere regret to the scheduled breaking open of breasts whose milk runs out over the entrails of still-alive babies, transformation of witnessing eyes to pulp-fragments, implosion of skinned penises into carcass-gulleys.
We are the humans, men who can make; whose language imagines mercy, lovingkindness; we have believed one another mirrored forms of a God we felt as good—
who do these acts, who convince ourselves it is necessary; these acts are done to our own flesh; burned human flesh is smelling in Viet Nam as I write.
Yes, this is the knowledge that jostles for space in our bodies along with all we go on knowing of joy, of love;
our nerve filaments twitch with its presence day and night, nothing we say has the not the husky phlegm of it in the saying, nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness, the deep intelligence living at peace would have.
Advent 1966
Because in Vietnam the vision of a Burning Babe is multiplied, multiplied, the flesh on fire not Christ’s, as Soulthwell saw it, prefiguring the Passion upon the Eve of Christmas,
but wholly human and repeated, repeated, infant after infant, their names forgotten, Their sex unknown in the ashes, set alight, flaming but not vanishing, not vanishing, as his vision but lingering.
cinders upon the earth or living on moaning and stinking in hospitals three abed;
because of this my strong sight, my clear caressive sight, my poets sight I was given that it might stir me to song, Is blurred. There is a cataract filming over my inner eyes. Or else a monstrous insect has entered my head, and looks out from my sockets with multiple vision ,
seeing not the unique Holy Infant burning sublimely, an imagination of redemption, furnace in which souls are wrought into new life, but, as off a beltline, more, senseless figures aflame.
And this insect (who is not there- it is my own eyes do my seeing, the insect is not there, what I see is there) will not permit me to look elsewhere,
or if I look, to see except dulled and unfocused the delicate, firm whole flesh of the still unburned.
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