Ed Roberson

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.

i must be careful about such things as these. the thin-grained oak.    the quiet grizzlies scared into the hills by the constant tracks squeezing in behind them closer in the snow.    the snared rigidity of the winter lake.    deer after deer crossing on the spines of fish who look up and stare with their eyes pressed to the ice.   in a sleep.  hearing the thin taps leading away to collapse like the bear in the high quiet.   i must be careful not to shake anything in too wild an elation.    not to jar the fragile mountains against the paper far- ness.   nor avalanche the fog or the eagle from the air. of the gentle wilderness i must set the precarious words.   like rocks.   without one snowcapped mistake.

She would post herself in the way in lines headed to transfer stops, to change, or haunt intersections with four way full scarecrow indecision, stop on the corners of streets, and in the aisles of buses, preaching only that which has never left these crossings for road, for choice    — the angry fear.       She seats at the feasts   — Thanksgiving, any holiday, any family place setting   — the hunger of others’ satisfaction for herself, she seeks it said this is what she deserves, if only of herself. What she thinks she thinks needs to be said whatever anyone else thinks to be honest. So there she sings from that part of the door she’s never got through, the eye which requires it all taken   off    down all blown away    to get through to that still naked-ness of clear again even if she’s not        still, the voice comes through that if we could listen as she is equally raw    hear with meat and gut below the skin, beyond the last violence, to the silence just before the bone      if we could still hear there we’d hear 2 What hand can you offer one wanting just to get even for what it doesn’t know what, just to take out what it feels on someone else to hurt because it can’t get at where it hurts      itself to have to see to clear like a movie fakes done seeing sharper than thought can cut to it; what hand can you offer one that doesn’t know even as a balance any other than more as my half and who counts itself that much     more and that more proofless     multiple unanswerably human hurts because it can’t figure out a figure to answer how it wants so count doesn’t count higher than want and want also falls short enough to take someone down for it but there is no size for another to be cut down to but none but death    this is so frustrating 3 You see me get the hell away from her don’t you     quick as I can    and I bein nice she act all girlfriend but that bitch dangerous she pull so much rotten shit on peoples she due to get her ass killed anytime and I don’t tend to be nowhere near round I ain’t getting cut down just for standin next to her     I ain’t all that innocent but I don’t be lookin for nothing I don’t deserve

As at the far edge of circling the country, facing suddenly the other ocean, the boundless edge of what I had wanted to know, I stepped into my answers’ shadow ocean, the tightening curl of the corners of outdated old paperbacks, breakers, a crumble surf of tiny dry triangles around my ankles sinking in my stand taken that the horizon written by the spin of my compass is that this is is not enough a point to turn around on, is like a skin that falls short of edge as a rug, that covers a no longer natural spot, no longer existent to live on from, the map of my person come to the end of, but not done. That country crossed was what I could imagine, and that little spit of answer is the shadow— not the ocean which casts it— that I step next into to be cleansed of question. But not of seeking …it as if simplified for the seeking, come to its end at this body.

Trees have whole streets of when they were planted plaqued with when the city is to inherit them dead of age almost all at once as if a natural bombing. People see a bill not figured in, a blood red collection come like fall’s leaf due without fail an unseen cost of the design: pale bud and yellow blossom— though seeming little to do this time with tense spring in the window of dead and dying trees’ terms up, with expecting a life by life replacement— not this plague of life’s time as a season across the city. By trial we do, but don’t know how death counts the rings from trees to clocks, species to singled soul at its hour. or on history’s days we all die at once.