Glenn Bach

 from Atlas Peripatetic

108

Let these drawings show
the status of the morning.

Wake, now
in the city they represent.

Evaporation lifts
upwards.

Elsewhere, snowplows
tear into silent corridors.

***

130

Kill and be rough,
wander and render.

Declare sold
    these medicines and correctives,
the purpose of travel
    without stopping.

Who maps this neighborhood
    of points and signals?

Who is intermittently aware?

Who tallies this audience of patrons
    in seat or station,
a quorum of lines drawn,
the twelve parts of heaven?

Who lode,
who burrow?

***

131

Image hover
    through gloss of crow.

A light violet
    on rain gutter.

Handy to the nest,
a signal of land ahead.

What loss of gray weather,
grip loosed from metal.

Sonic, ultrasonic
    terror eyes.

Thus the reason of scare,
a region of all seeing.

***

155

Impossible dust,
listening for water
beneath streets.

Near-miss,
smoke out there
across the river
banking and black
billow, surprise
         of high iron
shower of paper,
late again trains
stranded, crowded
stops, not a small
rubble and acrid.

Rained much of last
         of what was not there
in this sight of smog
against the very blue
empty open
below which
         everything
downwind of water
upon land and earth.

Steel girders down
lens of this cloud
of dirt and ash,
bewildered and bad
sun dark in scale,
secrets far greater.

Shelter in normalcy
harbored, sustained
scale of numbers,
the full text
    of two cities.

Midst of bridges,
how long the trip
cold enough to turn.

Tension, the air.

***

202

Lurch
         against the faint
incline, sparse
    scattering of stars.

         With waves
an evil, shrouds
    of a ship, laurels
worn by nations
                   or thieves.

Beauty we try
    to preserve,
undoing the world
              one morning
         at a time.

***
***