What are the two drastically different situations compared in "What Saves Us" by Bruce Weigl?

In Bruce Weigel's poem "What Saves Us," the two situations
being compared is the narrator's attempt to make love to a woman the night before he
ships out to war, and surviving that war.

In his fear and
anxiety, the narrator believes that by making love to this young woman, that if he would
die, he refused to do so never having made love to
her.

The next
morning I would leave

for the war and I thought...to
myself

that I would not die never
having

been inside her
body.

The past between them
he refers to as the "parking lot of the high school of our failures." We might infer
that enlisting was one of the few choices open to him upon graduation. This act of
making love may remind him that he is fully alive, and give him the sense that he would
be protected from death—which allows us to infer that he is frightened about what will
happen to him in the war.

However, before they consummate
the act, they stop: perhaps his shuddering alludes to his early "culmination" before the
act can be fully completed, and reality stepping in with the sound of bells going off in
the hallways of the empty school.

The bells going off may
foreshadow the actual fighting on the battlefield—the bells symbolic of the "rockets
roaring in" in the last line of the poem.

With the end of
their passionate "interlude," the young woman gives the narrator a crucifix—Jesus on the
cross...

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...the tiny savior's
head

hanging, and stakes through his hands and his
feet.

This might indicate
that the narrator at the moment also feels that perhaps the war will lead to his own
sacrifice—his own death. The poem's title refers to "What Saves Us," and with the gift
of the crucifix and the deep, long hug that the young woman gives him, the narrator is
comforted. His fear and "release" is alluded to with the
phrase:

...my
heart's black wings were
calmed.

It is at this point
that we notice the poem's turning point: the poet
writes...

We
are not always right

about what we think will save
us.

The narrator reminisces
about the time spent in the back seat of his father's car. The girl he was with he
refers to as an "angel:"

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I thought that dragging the angel down that
night

would save
me...

However, he finds that
there is something spiritual that he carries in the form of the crucifix: that instead
of his memory of making love with his girl, he depends on her gift, which he
carried...

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...in my pocket

and
rubbed it on my face and lips

nights the rockets roared
in.

We can assume that he is
saved in that he has written this poem. He comments about the ravages of war around him,
knowing that death is very close to him:

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People die sometimes so near
you,

you feel them struggling to cross
over...

Ironically, the poem
starts with images of the tangled bodies of lovers in a car, and ends with tangled
bodies of war...

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...the deep untangling, of one body from
another.

...as their spirits
struggle—also as the soldier's spirit had struggled at the beginning—but
this time, the struggle comes from sorting through the dead and
wounded bodies around him, while the spirits of the dead try to cross
over.

We assume this crossing is spiritual between life and
death. It may also mirror the soldier's individual struggle to face the prospect of
death in war—crossing over from youth and innocence (believing that making love will
save him) to a place where he can only depend on his faith to lift him up amid the
chaos, and protect him from the same fate of so many others around
him.