Poetry

"And your spoil shall be gathered like the gathering
of the caterpillar: as the running to and fro of locusts shall he
run upon them." —Isaiah 33:4

resists the weight of anonymity.
Embedded beneath sidewalk-glass,
sanded by frenetic years

of feet, its face peers up
like a drowned man submerged
in ice. A jewelry store window

mirrors thawing sun.
A glass façade flashes
copper. I eat a yellow apple, dissolve

into glare. Wreathing the clocks' face,
the slogan of a long-defunct
department store:

Buy on time.
Be on time.
The clock's enameled hands turn

into the scrolled I's
of illuminated Bibles. Harp in hand, Isaiah
sings the chirps & trills

of desert locusts. Now
the clock hands saw with cello bows—
tempos throbbing

even as the clock slows
or stops, and time lets me, I
imagine, catch up.

The Greek & Roman Galleries,
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

worn away, stretches toward the ceiling
like a tree on the edge

of a cliff. A ragged cloth swags across
his pectorals—fullness & phallus

exposed. His body is an abandoned palace
of sweat,

unable to forget the striving of a clasped
hand, the hamartia

that bothers life into art,
seed into tree,

petals, hulls, leaves:
debris.

His bronze hand unfists my gape
from the precipice

of doing …
done.