CONTINUOUS WORLD

If love, now, is the sum of my every day,
A continuous world which will not tolerate
Velleities of return to that first Void
Before Being that does not know defeat;

If every dawn dies for the color scarlet—
Through what ungoverned accidents does spring,
Fatally safe and certain of its power
To impose its light on us tomorrow, change?

But now a desert crunches suddenly
Underfoot, sprouts its thorny flower.
Dryness and distance and bleak emptiness.

And meanwhile, by a straight and certain course,
Without a backward slip, just as before,
The river spills itself into the sea.