The Circle - for the PBS' 50th Birthday

Keep the 5 and give me the 0,
the zero, where all poems start
and end, the circle
of skewed light guarded by
all the poems written before,
each tagged with the name of its author,
with lines flashing off lines
in a spiral to the moon,
the dead talking to the living,
the unborn eavesdropping,
and bouncing up and down that helix
the poems that blaze,
that re-materialise during sleep,
but the 0 contains even these,
spins its high wall around them
to the sleepy murmur of consonants.