Something

Who wasn’t in that drugstore, called Tan t’ien: one of the infinite points

nexal to pressing the accelerator from miles behind

and devouring the signatures of emergence.

The moment is the belly-oven, Polycarp in his flaming vault.

Who didn’t meet their father there, lavender and unapparent,

in the paradox of motion’s presence: pleasurable brotherhood

of being seeming together (though under Fort Scott’s no

uncertain terms); being what the place demands.

Geography is the art of contingency, so the stone is cut

and a circle in no-place bangs its inviolate skillet.

Non-stick? Too sincere not to: and yet a hunger without forewarning,

that fascinating animal still presses you to recur. Warm

underscore of the memory, or its invention

to recur or be a father (or was it, “farther”) dressed in heat

in skin only, where there is no man, but this drugstore,

this watch kept in Kansas somewhere, 

the watch of Berkeley, a rattle in not Jerusalem but somewhere within

for the procession of one’s friends, you bless in the place of your attentions.