“The phrase I like to use to describe my sense of time—a play on comparative literature—is comparative time.”

i.
So it is, the chaos
contracted

in an unfolding scene
in five sentences:

Body. History. Evil. God. Human.   

ii.
But what ideas,
in what facts? Inside the sun

the heat is sucking
the soil’s moisture,

Fulton near Pearl, dug up to lay new Fulton Center 
subway power lines, a stone wall, three feet high, 
in silt-muck seven feet below street level, inside it 

Aged malt whiskey and cigarettes
   consumed to enhance consciousness
—read Blake. You can’t regulate

I bend
over the machine. Heat
and oil