1.

Each breath at least a half-life,
a pause between anthrax scare
and modern memory. And each
gaze lifted from the sidewalk
half-filled with a rising moon
sliced and weighted over the city.
Uranus in Capricorn,
not far from Heaven’s triangle,
night’s space respiring
indifference and geometry.


    2.

The day through which all meander
is sun-diced and air-light. Work
beckons into its simplifications:
desk, task, words in a wash
of suspended particles
through which paper gleams.


    3.

Thoughts of rubble, flesh,
of sound now dispersed,
mind torn by the impulse
to dedicate the lines
to memory and grief,
one’s lone solidity.


    4.

Breath, word, isotope
and quantum, vulnerable
to ghosting. Backdrop
of design and phantom,
death shining through
transposed across the writing.


                                        November 2001