Deep in the fog of multitudes honeycombing history,
Below the dance of the dimensions in mirrored sleep,
These familiar noises cut at my cardboard hour:
A train pulls into a spiral of dark sounds;
A milkman shakes the low bells of milk bottles
In the iron baskets of our civilization;
The horse’s hoofs whip up the wagon wheels;
A cough reaches out an arm for an alarm clock;
A small dog’s bark runs after a truck’s sound
But makes no progress on the icy ground.
On my blood-and-bone balcony poised perilously
Over the morning canyons of the present tense
I arise to view the times I have awakened in:
Europe spreads helpless hands called newspapers
And leans against the horizon of a bleak intent;
A dictator is eating the apple in our garden
And war studies the scarred face of geography
Behind the Stonehenge framework letting in myths;
With distance stuck in its throat, a radio mutters;
The world’s philosophies clack, like loose shutters.
This is the shadow from under steel lids of sunlight
That watches me dressing brightly in consciousness:
I hear an early morning whistle hang a blue icicle
Upon the lintel of my personal class struggle.
I must hasten to the heaven inhabited by breakfast
Where lunch rooms lurch forward on rolling plates
And coffee swings brown flowers through the senses
For I am a citizen of the three divided tenses
And know a new day threatens to invade the sill
With all the past an unanswered problem still.
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