Prime Number

It looks like a man wearing a shawl whose body is
another shawl wrapped around a man who has already
gone to his death in a subway, an office building,
a chair beside a hospital bed—a man leaning against
a lectern, or rising from a seat on a train that is leaving a city
for another city; it looks like sunrise or midnight; it looks
like prayer or hunger whose table and chair is without
company, without the forgiveness of bread and meat;

it looks like a woman sitting on a bus where two dozen
are seated at an intersection where nothing is meant
to keep from occurring; where nothing is meant to return
the explosion to the briefcase of work at her feet,
the weight of the sweater whose sleeves cross her breasts
to the dark emptiness of the body’s withdrawal—
shoulder and arm, the wrist and palm’s volume of light:
time that crosses the body’s corridor, the eye’s division.