SKYSCRAPER TECTONICS - Shaya Block

From the edge of the river

The backhoe-exorcised

Plates of pleated steel -

Knapped -

Rapture from the earth;

An acheulean hand ax lying in wait.

Some flimsy bit -

From an archeological site -

Of evidence

That people built here;

That there was something worth

Keeping the rain out,

Keeping the bright heat arching

between the steel limbs -

That despite their insignificance

Worked and died here

For something more

Than a ground-pressed stone, the fracture

Of a labored monument.

A pressure-flaked unit of dead time;

Jutting from the sidewalk

Atom thin like a ripple

Of potato chip; Its obsidian edge sheer

Against the scalpel-sliced ozone

By the recent formation of peaks and valleys

Dragging down and cutting through

The space

between the east and west

Rivers

of a more methodical type

Of incision upon the land;

Erosion knapps

With its old whetstone wheel;

And when the banks have long-since been

Washed away and receded -

Constricting the prism of obsidian

From both sides

With diamond-pressure

Two miles of tinted panes

end-to-end, lazily paved

In macadam and cullet rubble.

The Manhattan shelf worn

To palm-sized shards.

The thinness of what’s left