Two Two Two Two Two
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Two Two Two Two Two


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William Butler Yeats Fonds: Assorted Poetry (Unpublished), Archives and Revision Section High-Yield Data Storage, Site-43.

The Half-Men

One day I dreamed (though I did not sleep)
That a half-man called on my shaded bower
And upon me laid such a heavy load
That it taxes me every waking hour:

Liberty is a transitory state.

One night awake (for I do not dream)
I was called upon by his other half
He oppressed my heart with a freedom-cry
Which within me rings as an epitaph:

Stasis is slavery.

Now my days and nights are no longer mine
As their burdens flow from my fountain-pen
For they haunt me still (though they are not here)
And I wish no longer to know half-men.

— February 22, 1898


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The Concordance

Corrupted soil a harvest yields
Where the tyrant tends his fields
Blackened earth he tills and then
He plants his seeds of salt again

And yet…

She sings successive serenades
To feel the fear the falcon tastes
While by the shores the asses bray
And loose their courage on the spray

And yet…

In iron mail the hand contracts
And marrow breaks upon the racks
Which turn to tunes of homely things:
Famine, poverty and kings

And yet…

The deluge overtops the banks
To cries of overwhelming thanks
While surges beat the dikes to dust
And we are drowned, all of us

And yet…

The workings wend and wind along
The sickly nourishing the strong
Who plant their heels upon the prone
And press their teeth into the stone

And yet…

The shepherds all have gone to ground
Their herds are loose and stormward bound
In righteous lack of common sense
They break like water on the fence

And then…

It ends in fire, wind and rain
A flattening of the earthly plane
Our fingers in the eyes of God
And two black silhouettes applaud

Again…

— February 22, 1918


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22222

I take no comfort from the setting sun
That distant fire in a fathomless sea
As I stand on the plain, knapping flint
And my skin cracks in the cosmic heat
For I do not know by whose hand it moves
And I do not believe it will always be so.

I am afraid of the rising moon
A light in the black which affords no warmth
I shiver alone at the cave-mouth
And I shy from that baleful judgement
To await the dawn, when the frost is dispelled
But not the doubt.

Never the doubt.

They are two, and one, and the same
Indifferent eyes among hostile stars
I do not know what they want from me.

I am talking around the point
While we circle the drain
And the format collapses
Under the weight of the missing words
And the metaphors fail;
They are nothing like the sun
They are nothing like the moon
Their orbits are not arcs, but gyres
They are not distant orbs, but men who walk the Earth
I am no Palaeolithic oaf, wordlessly cursing the inexorable tides
But for all my decades of familiarity
The long black course of hateful visitation
I cannot call this thing what I know it to be
I cannot speak the name of my unease
But I must try:

I fear our collective vexation
This thousand-year cycle of abuse and indulgence
Will end with the breaking of an arc
When both sink past the horizon
And only one comes 'round again.

— February 22, 1938


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2022

22 February

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

"We're living in Yeats' nightmare," Harold Blank sighed.

They peered through the observation glass at the old man lying prone on the simple cot. He was breathing low, so low that he seemed almost still.

"How long has he been like this?"

Harry glanced at Thilo Zwist. The old thaumaturge seemed just moments away from tapping the glass, as though they were watching a reptile basking in a vivarium and not an eldritch horror in human form lying comatose in containment.

"January of last year," Harry responded. "Our former Chief of Security shot him. We don't really know why."

Zwist shook his head. "Of course you know why. You've had these two locked up for a generation. You know everything there is to know about them."

"We know more than there is to know about them," Lillian Lillihammer corrected him. "We blew almost twenty years on alternate timeline shenanigans thanks to the other one."

"So you say," Zwist nodded. "But I'll note those timeline reports have yet to be declassified."

"I'm working on it," Harry muttered.

"So tell me," Zwist pressed. "Who is this man? I am somewhat acquainted with his double, of course; the master of the giftschreiber, the source, at a remove, of my modest abilities—"

"And my soon-to-be not-so-modest ones," Lillihammer interjected.

"—but I did not know there was another. Who is he?"

Harry squirmed. "It's a long story."

"Then you had better start telling it, and soon." Zwist turned back to the glass, and pressed one palm against it. The figure on the cot stirred in his endless sleep. "The end of the world poses something of a tight timeframe."

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