Three pigeons down-swing
through a chimney of air
onto Black Tom — a rock
in the Sound's shallows, bare
but for gulls' dung
and clams' broken crocks.
There is no food there:

not even a flotsam weed
from high-tide. No food.
Unless you're a rock-dove
that maybe eats rocks; or brood
of the Roc and feed
on imponderables — plasm of
lost time, dreamt magnitude.

Time plasm: There's a neat
notion, if lunatic,
like — whose was it, who said
our souls make an aspic
for the moon to eat?
He saw man as aphid
in an ant-heap zodiac.

Well, who knows what stocks
of men the moon needs?
She does drag out of us
dreams, longings, certain tides
in the blood, paradox —
being Ishtar, libidinous,
and Dian, light-of-maids.

Maybe time's the stuff
a moon eats. The white
meat of desire, the dark
of regret, a meat
Universe had none of
till mind reached fore and back —
and to immortals, sweet.

Something is ranching us:
We grow in numbers; all
our plagues, wars, genocides
don't dent the capital
stock, the increasing mass,
cracking on all sides
our ancient closed corral;

and always we strew in wake
of the planet — and cast ahead —
cobwebs of time ... To the moon,
maybe, or some dread
Draco? ... A chance we take
till pigeons settle in
their pigeon-holes for good.











By permission of the author.