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.