On Peripheries of the Imperium by Lawrence Joseph

On Peripheries of the Imperium

i

Eye of the hurricane the Battery, the Hudson

breached, millions of gallons of it

north on West Street filling Brooklyn–Battery

Tunnel, overflowing into the World Trade Center site,

East River, six-to-eight-foot wall of water on South,

Front, Water, John, Fulton, Pearl,

Brooklyn Bridge’s woven cables lifted delicately

in hurricane sky.

ii

Perhaps I make too much of it, that time,

Eldon Axle, brake plates dipped

in some sort of liquid to protect them from

dust, dirt, metal chips the grinding caused —

that time, night shift, press-machine shop

on Outer Drive, rolls of stainless steel put in,

fixed up, because the work you do is around fire

your cuticles burn if the mask’s not on right.

iii

When the mind is clear, to hear the sound

of a voice, of voices, shifts in the attitude

of syllables pronounced. When the mind

is clear, to see a Sunday, in August, Shrine

of Our Lady of Consolation, Carey, Ohio,

at a holy water font, a mother washes

her six-year-old’s fingers crushed in an accident

so that they’ll heal.

iv

So what percentage of Weasel Boy’s DNA

do you think is pure weasel? Tooth-twisted,

Yeats’s weasels, in “Nineteen Hundred

and Nineteen,” fighting in a hole.

v

Conflated, the finance vectors, opaque

cyber-surveillance, supranational cartels,

in the corporate state’s political-economic singularity

the greatest number of children

in United States history are, now, incarcerated,

having been sentenced by law.

vi

A comic dimension to it, on this F train

to One Hundred Sixty-Ninth Street

in Queens? He doesn’t want to disturb you,

but, see, he was stabbed in the face

with an ice pick, he lost his left eye — 

lid pried open with thumb and forefinger — 

here, look, he’ll show you — 

a white-and-pink-colored iris.