Shadow and Image

Driven enemies meet on the beach, a flash of sword,

Glimmer of belt. We watch the many streaming generations

Give rhetoric to sleepless flecks of composite flesh.

Hard on the shores the planes hurl by, they shatter

The void, explode in succession, shake the shore

And outleap sound. And the glass towers raise on the earth,

Mountains and roads go down and rise, the green city

Melts, and new plants and men are born. And white

Cities of another world within the world grow.

Abdera rolls through galactic dust,

And London and Paris, Babylon, Shiraz.

Resolution waits by an intricate coast

By illusory light in the endless rolling sleep of stars.

SHADOW AND IMAGE

Eyes, turn inward far from the light, eyes do not

Record the light.

The wide world within, uncoiling spiral,

Unwinds upon the dawn of the first world's towers.

Sunrise blurs them, light burns

Hard on the multiple lens of sky, even the light

Which first creates your vision,

All world images dissolving

In lime, the conscious flood from the ever dividing

Rivers of Eden.

Outward the waters roll, reverse into one. The waste

Volcanic dust

Spills all day on the green height, the guarded slope.

The flaming sword at last burns down to ashes.

Still in the warm dark stream

The image of Adam floats face down, the same

Image of the first self,

Invisible, dark, then clear,

Then light as the eyes of the altered god on the crimson

Mediterranean.

Eyes have seen the flower of multiple vision,

Twirling suns,

Petal, circle divulging form in the darkness,

Only in darkness. Always the final instant

Flames in the darkness. Angels

Invented the dream of yourself, angels brushed

Your dreaming flesh with the next

Emergent dream of gods.

And four great beasts with many eyes, with six wings,

Looked on the sleeping God.

Eyes, turn to the inside of the wide world, see

Image of blue

Sky, uncurling self, the image of beast,

Each a blade of light on the violet twinkling

Edge of creation, burning

Still on the lids of the inner sky turned outward.

Out of the seed of the first world

You were, you became, I am.

Angels run like children through the city when you wake

Into the real world.