152. Stone from the Forbidden City

Night comes warm and dark
with walking and what walking does

And feet go walking slow
with darkness and what darkness moves

Stuck in the flat, far, tall wall
of the gothic Tribune are all
these stones from every space
we’d ever imagined we’d never
been to and those we’d visited

Embedded in the wall of this
building studded with stones
from the Forbidden City, from
the Great Pyramid at Giza

These named but unidentifiable
pieces of the entire world, a pair
of gargoyle nostrils from Notre
Dame, or a square flat stone

My interest is in firewords as
we watch the fireworks expand

Efflorescences of bursts of fire
and the words that make them real

Light taking the form of neon,
of fluorescence, of glowing, and
light taking the form of fire,
explosion, reflection on water

The night sees everything because
only through darkness can
anything see anything else moving
like light through water or glass

Light may seem to rise or
to fall depending on how it runs

Light always moves forward,
regardless of what it ruins

The Alamo, Trondheim Cathedral,
the Great Wall of China, the dome
of St Peter’s Cathedral in Rome,
the Parthenon, the White House

Squared stone upon squared
stone, and embedded stone that
comes from it, the squared forms
of seeing the building before us

Hold in your eye the sign of the light,
and hold in your hand the light itself

Light that falls as water-with-light
onto your now-dry pants and shirt

You see in the form of the shape
that the sense of the word gives you
as you read it, the shape of the form
of the light that you cannot see

You hear in the space of the sound
that light seems to take, as if it were
a thing of breathing, what you
would hear in the heart of your eye

System of walking together in place
of the process of sitting as we move

System of walking in damask light
as a means of moving through it all

Sound of the L along Wabash as
the sound of our thinking when
our thinking was done, and sound
of the L along Wabash as what it merely is

The L along Wabash moves in
the direction I move, in the direction
of light, moves forward, always
forward into the far and farway night