terça-feira, 24 de janeiro de 2023

Meditações - um gnómon de ausência...

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.


Ed Roberson

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