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   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 Vietnam 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 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