We draw the ground we stand on, as shadows that wisp, as brooms of thatch. We are hungry sometimes, each of us, and stand at our own loose notch of the corner, for the benefit of a wandering motorist, looking down and holding our poses for “hungry” (which is fingers far apart, and so resting in the ruts of our stomachs). For each other member I will speak, and with a wide gesture I will indicate our premises: here is a building, a turret of baked stone, no aperture, no inhabitant confirmed; there is a building, blackened wood ratcheted by black nails to join, a barefoot group resting swollen feet in the spiky gaps; there is a building, burnt sheaves of straw, a hunted woman within, peeking a crevice between her fingers. Get between lots, lots in laps, with shadows that wisp like brooms of thatch. The crack-grasses bend here to the rumbling earth; they start up in a bunch, and then regret it.
We visit, again and again, the places where we have been. Where walls were tall on markless park, now thigh-high fields of splintered stone. Where sparks struck, letting out slight whines of ozone, on the tips to the tops of fences, fences that meandered and walked here, this street to that, weaving near drunken; little hedges of mashed wire-scrabble. Each star is a hole in the scene’s side, that hisses canned air.
No bullet moves, but we run into each one. No knife is held by human hand; we fumble into them wherever we step. Any warning sound is hard to hear. We usually stand in a row in the trainyards, a roundhouse bustle now gone to lots, hunched in view of the maundering fence. The fence that walked right across the street. When there was an El I could see every part of the city, every part at once. The stars ahead were then districted as part of the city, it had risen to annex them; no one could venture to sort them out from the fireworks each night. The occasional airplanes I saw, or airlifts...I saw spotlights at their exercise. And now we can’t even make it across the lot.
-2002
