Linda Marie Van Tassell (Lynchburg, Virginia)

Love, love, catastrophe.
What a collapse of the world!
A horrible blast on the roofs
smashes columns, centuries,
replaces them with timeless
skies. You go, I go
through rubble
of summers and shattered
winters. Weights
and standards become extinct.
All life goes backward,
frantically stripping itself
of centuries,
raveling, at a gallop,
its course that once was slow,
exhausting itself in the yearning
to obliterate history,
by only sheer
longing to begin
again. The future's
called yesterday: most hidden,
secret yesterday,
which we forgot,
and which we must recover
with blood and soul,
back of those other
known yesterdays.
Back! Always back!
Backtracking, dizzily,
inward, toward tomorrow!
Let everything collapse! Now I hardly
feel it. Let's go on,
with the help of kisses,
inventing the ruins
of the world, hand in hand,
you and I,
in the midst of the total failure
of flower and order.
And now as I touch, as I embrace,
I feel your skin
give me the way back
to the first pulsation
before light was, before the world was:
total, formless, chaos.