After my shift at the Foundling Hospital, the moon is down,
the death of a moth is nothing. I'm not alone. Ezekiel's wheel sweeps
through rocket fire, in the palpitating light of an asteroid--Eros 433--
a binary pulsar echoes into what's blank and blind and homey:
I'm sick to my stomach at each city bus stop bomb in Tel Aviv.
We'd thought we'd won this one. Rabin is dead, another orphan
of Seventh Avenue is gone,and all this naming is little more
than adiabatic cooling on the planet Mars. I mean, the music
steeps each granite outcrop we call us, a hiss of Galapagos,
where we lose our sheen off God. Blasted heath of Lapland
or Belize is ripping a sear into what a map once was: I walk
sideways with an infant in each arm to further any written-
down, apocalyptic opening of heaven. There's fury
in ferment, there's tales to be told in images of ice or fire,
blank stares of bog men, soldiers shivering and shameless,
cold black Atalantic pillars in the dark, a starless night--
like revolutionists, dancers, or spurned desire, we smutch
our lips and gnaw the selfsame flesh that's hacked or hewn
in the rat or rabbit traps our chill-crazed mentors set for us,
mercury-bled and foundried in stone like old chintz mirrors,
shards of evil caught in the blinking retinas of every single child.