Life-and-Destruction                                                            Page 34

Music takes us into the realm of creative imagination and sensual experience,

into beauty, art, poetry, and it is here that "we meet at last and meeting bless".

To "bless" is to make holy or, better, to acknowledge what is already holy.

"Dumb images" evoke the spirits of earth, air, fire, water, love and death, life

and destruction - the spirit of:

                                            ... a wine,

a drunkenness that can't be spoken or sung

without betraying it. Far past Yours or Mine,

even past Ours, it has nothing at all to say;

it slants a sudden laser through common day. ("Grace", C.P. p.331)

"The Maker", "The Killer", "Shadow", "The Other Half taken together

explore a spirituality that accepts that life and destruction are parts of each

other, that creation and destruction are inseparable. Poems like these, placed in

relationship, mirror each other and have a pain/joy/joy/pain effect.   The

differences are non-oppositional and non-dialectical. The "truth" is in the

"darkness". The same must be said of "Flame-Tree In A Quarry", "Dry

Storm", "A Child's Nightmare", "Destruction" and "Snakeskin On A Gate",

each of which contains in itself the same coupling of energies usually seen as

oppositional.