Three Poems

Clocks
To Federico Zeri

1
I pass a half-naked child
asleep on a marble slab in Grand Central Station.
I remember a painting: the Infant Christ
asleep on a red marble slab,
and another: the man, Christ Dead,
on the same red marble stone of unction.
'T'he great iron clocks
in the railroad stations of Christendom
witness nothing,
they are simply above with their everydayness,
in natural, artificial, and supernatural light.
I turn my head away from the faceless
puddles of drying urine
...