Man, frightening animal, snarls in the chains of gravitation,
With godhead, a quicksilver skeleton, in his body,
The miracle of language hanging from his tongue;
He crawls down the boulder of history, gleaming and bloody,
And drinks from the well, the aeons panting from his lung,
And anoints his forehead with the starlight of elation.
Man, tinkering with his gewgaw civilizations,
The fragrance of music raging around his bone,
His heart a sea of paws and a roar of despair
Drags the huge evening out where he stands alone,
Terrifies the ants and dismays the solar air,
While the beaks of skylines sink in the flesh of nations.
His propellers are peering at peaks that scatter
In the darkened bosom of the moth and the morning year
Above guttering seas whose light no wind can put out:
And man drinks of the well and his eyes become clear
Dissolving the telescoped walls of his death and doubt,
For this is the way of his faith and the mastery of matter.
And the walls are leveled to terraces of splendor,
And melted are the many mirrors of the enemy
To blue lakes of peace humming songs of light and bread,
And the air is cleansed of the shoulders of antiquity,
Cleansed of the debris of the inconsiderate dead,
And the canyons overrun with the morning’s crescendo….
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