I believe it was from the river end of Sutton Place in Manhattan I descended
a spiraled cement stairway and looked across the sunlit street where
that morning there were black helicopters buzzing heavy-headed overhead
something going on
and I was surprised to note that right there where I had walked on lunch hour
beyond the waist high iron barred guardrail fence spiraling down
--good fences make good neighbors, it might have said—
across the street swept totally clean of yesterday’s dogs and pedestrians
lay the calm façade of the United Nations, so I paused,
looked behind me, read “’They shall beat their swords into ploughshares’- Eclesiastes”
and walked over the clean streets to pace unmolested the fenced-in playing fields.

A similar fence lay along the edge of the cement I walked
and beyond that the East River.
I was not far from Hellespont or Spuytendyval,
nor from the Unicorn Tapestries the Rockefellers brought from Europe. Not far.

The same fence has followed me across the eastern seaboard in later years.
I have seen it lined up linear and intractable and reassuring
before the Indonesian Embassy in Washington and before The White House
and within The Old Executive Office Building and around the grounds of Virginia homes,
and even around old New England cemeteries…sometimes high and sometimes not,
but always keeping some things out and letting others in.
It’s the sightless things you feel on the air that still come through,
the little things, invisible, that make you what you are;
and they’re not linear.
They pass between the digits and digital equations.

I think it is only the residue of our lives
that can be mapped in electronic impulses…only the residue.
The vacuum of space itself is a compressible medium
yielding a B Flat moan across infinite time.
Though we push ourselves outward across the linear planets
and dance down the rays of light beyond time in metal ships,
we are only passing through today,
barely touching the depthless surface of the word.