Over Here
A wall of clocks in an antique shop
consuming the time they make
self-feeders accurate within a century or two
no two read quite the same unless you walk
the wall slowly and watch them watching you
then flip, spin, grind to all agree
a chorus of the dead says
when the world was flat
they’d just fall off the edge
out of time, of place
soon lose any sense of falling
to merge with the cosmic backdrop
of indifference, the everywhere no-place
we travel not as you living do
a stray thought not our own
takes us somewhere with boundaries
streets, houses, rivers, horizons
every somewhere has
on a bench in a green park
a few yards from a harbor
we watch waters come and go
as near to repetitions
as to be mistaken for them
such is place, is home
you treasure so while we have lost
nothing having lost them
a white flutter of sea gulls’ late afternoon
some landing, waddling about on triangular feet
and having painted the sidewalk wander off
taking their horizons with them
having little else to do the dead study indifference
finding it like our small skin-full
a mask for something more binding
by long acquaintance it shows itself
as compassion, the only true light
sticks to anything with a touch so soft
it’s rarely felt at all and when it is
it is at first the imagined breath of the dead
an indifference we know all too well
that’s not a poem they complain
we answer; Over Here is neither time and place
nor All, only light-show vapors
from an ever-smaller sheaf of papers
The Dog Star 
Leave a Reply