Eclogue
I wonder if anyone ever thought
to tell time with them
know where their shadow
tipped on 3 o'clock
which floor which parking spot
from a window desk
or if they ever
stood completely over their own shade's dot
that moment they had no metered footprint;
a peek-a-boo we now find ticketed
as a before and an after
an either
side of a space the zero pulls into,
its long reserve wheel of nothing there.
Yet here a gnomon of absence bears its shadow
placement on some dial of brevity and cold
about life about
the footprint we may leave
empty of light
empty of even point to it.
Here it's flat and densely packed with people
unlike the empty open of the plain;
here our expanse
the grown over dumpsite
of the meadowlands wetlands or the shore
is corps of engineered
the bulldozer-beetle's
ball of dung shines in it and somewhere the body
hidden in our shit to fake us innocent...
one of our jokes sometimes things rise and float.
We
in the morning
catch, from the train, in the green garbage runoff,
sight of white herons and the cormorants.
When they’re there in the evening, we safely
assume the world hasn’t gone anywhere;
a take of bearings
the same the next morning
when we’d see the lit towers on the island
we were headed for
we see now the hour.
From the Jersey side we take a bearing, as
on mountains from the vantage of the plain,
on the towers from the vantage of the
dirt-stiffened, unyielding, tarmac of marsh
grass gray like
steel grayed a vegetable steel
from blur and the exhausts of the turnpike.
Position with regard to surrounding objects
here is unlike in the mountains which give
a bearing even from deep within them, let you
see them from inside their formation.
Climbing to the high plateau of the street
from the subway, we check the peaks downtown
or midtown
skyscrapers for direction.
Walk a few doors up the block they parallax
eclipsed by the postcard we no more see.
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