The Crooked Lines of God - Poems 1949-1954 #221227

So my new poetic vision, begun with a blaze back at conversion, slowly came to nothing. I wanted to write a great double work. I wanted to balance those fifteen years of a pagan pen with fifteen years of a holy one, the profane and the sacred. Out of the residual years of death I wanted to make an attestation to the veritable years of eternal life. But God is not so pat. He has other uses for a life than the balancing of books. The Divine Writing goes forward with an excoriate straightness, but never in the manner one supposes; nor does it ever relate precisely what one hopes to hear. I have written, but What I have written is undone, not done. I have labored to make a birth of my life, but it becomes, in retrospect, only a long c'rooked line. This much, however, I do know; and given the nature of Reality it cannot be otherwise: all my Violations, virulent as they are, in the end can only make for the good. My evil cannot win out.