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.

There was a deep well lit its entire depth

at noon on the solstice light without shadow:

so with an in-line position with regard

to the sun any cast line of shadow

would indicate a curve; the distance between

one and not, an arc of circumference.

That phrase of the psalm says death’s shadow is

as deep as that valley which is our grave;

its length is the same cast everywhere as deep;

no one’s is further from death than another’s;

death surrounds us is our uncurbed circumference.

We map our way with only the bearing

of surrounding life itself borderless

uncontrolled by the surface of our self.

The bridge towers of the Verrazano

are so far apart they tilt away from

each other on the curve of the earth factored in.

I wonder if from the distance apart

of the The Towers you could figure that reach

‘round of the world with this method of shadow?

The shadow of flesh casts how deep and far

a landscape of perspective? how round

a circumference enough to fit the living

world does a single life turning to its labor spin?

Take each story of a building as the radius

of expansion we make of the earth,

concentric spheres on Turtle Island,

the hundred ten circumferences go nova

So high a reach of vision set on so short

a perspective the world on the turtle's back:

at top, the wake of star formation at base, the animal

god. the jealous Need, a stomach

of feet trying to stand through this.

What can we say of our own that stand

in Newark say so far adrift from a chance

to wash that the dirt on her feet cracks

into sores the skin of her soles and steps her in

one more shit infection she has to kick,

one more occupation of her body by

her monkey rulers she will have to throw off

into space off her back burned out but clear

of starring habit. Of her destroyed sun say

it endows the landfill on which to build a

new development “We are the stuff of stars,” Sagan says.

Source: City Eclogue (Atelos, 2006)

Poetry and the Environment