Moving Parts

Someone welds a pipe on a metal stand

between a highway and a granite cliff.

Pull over and put your eye to the end

of the pipe. There. Can’t you see the profile

of Perry Mason? His eye, the square chin?

Years pass as life on earth and your own life

move you into the digital city.

Here any pipe you looked through would be filled

with straight edges, themselves celebrities.

So you start to keep rectangles on hand,

small totems of faces and vertices—

everyone has at least one, like passwords.

Everyone grows to have many, like teeth.

I climbed Telegraph Hill to Coit Tower

so my pulse testifies that the land lifts,

and from this view, the low parts look like swords

raised by a phalanx issuing a roar.