Selected Poems (Aiken)/Sound of Breaking

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SOUND OF BREAKING
Why do you cry out, why do I like to hear youCry out, here in the dewless evening, sittingClose, close together, so close that the heart stops beatingAnd the brain its thought? Wordless, worthless mortalsStumbling, exhausted, in this wilderness ​Of our conjoint destruction! Hear the grassRaging about us! Hear the worms applaud!Hear how the ripples make a sound of chaos!Hear now, in these and the other sounds of evening,The first brute step of God!
           About your elbow,Making a ring of thumb and finger, ISlide the walled blood against the less-walled blood,Move down your arm, surmount the wrist-bone, shutYour long slim hand in mine. Each finger-tipIs then saluted by a finger-tip;The hands meet back to back, then face to face;Then lock together. And we, with eyes averted,Smile at the evening sky of alabaster,See nothing, lose our souls in the maelstrom, turningDownward in rapid circles.
            Bitter woman,Bitter of heart and brain and blood, bitter as IWho drink your bitterness—can this be beauty?Do you cry out because the beauty is cruel?Terror, because we downward sweep so swiftly?Terror of darkness?
       It is a sound of breaking,The world is breaking, the world is a sound of breaking,Many-harmonied, diverse, profound,A shattering beauty. See, how together we break,Hear what a crashing of disordered chords and discordsFills the world with falling, when we thus leanOur two mad bodies together!
              It is a soundOf everlasting grief, the sound of weeping,The sound of disaster and misery, the soundOf passionate heartbreak at the centre of the world.
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