Sunday, September 11, 2011

September 11, 2011

Ten years ago I was in graduate school working on a long forgotten poem at home when my wife called and alerted me to the morning's events. When I turned on the TV & checked the news online, I quickly realized the enormity of the tragedy.  My oldest daughter, who was 1 at the time, had just begun day care in the Federal Courthouse in Boston so I could go back to school. Because of the Oklahoma City bombing everyone had to be evacuated from all federal buildings. My wife, who was pregnant at the time with our second daughter, ran to the courthouse from her office, grabbed our daughter, & drove as fast as she could home.

There has been much written in the last 10 years about that beautiful late-summer morning and we all have our own saturation levels to contend with. I, for one, greatly appreciated the focus and attention that poetry received at the time as a way to deal with craziness of it all. Suddenly people were talking about poetry as something that matters. Something important.

There have been many good poems written in response to the events of Sept 11th; you can use the google-machine to find the one's you like best. This is one of my favorites, by Bob Hicok.

Full Flight


I'm in a plane that will not be flown into a building.
It's a SAAB 340, seats 40, has two engines with propellers
is why I think of beanies, those hats that would spin
a young head into the clouds. The plane is red and loud
inside like it must be loud in the heart, red like fire
and fire engines and the woman two seats up and to the right
resembles one of the widows I saw on TV after the Towers
came down. It's her hair that I recognize, the fecundity of it
and the color and its obedience to an ideal, the shape
it was asked several hours ago to hold and has held, a kind
of wave that begins at the forehead and repeats with slight
variations all the way to the tips, as if she were water
and a pebble had been continuously dropped into the mouth
of her existence. We are eighteen thousand feet over America.
People are typing at their laps, blowing across the fog of coffee,
sleeping with their heads on the windows, on the pattern
of green fields and brown fields, streams and gas stations
and swimming pools, blue dots of aquamarine that suggest
we've domesticated the mirage. We had to kill someone,
I believe, when the metal bones burned and the top
fell through the bottom and a cloud made of dust and memos
and skin muscled across Manhattan. I remember feeling
I could finally touch a rifle, that some murders
are an illumination of ethics, that they act as a word,
a motion the brain requires for which there is
no syllable, no breath. The moment the planes had stopped,
when we were afraid of the sky, there was a pause
when we could have been perfectly American,
could have spent infinity dollars and thrown a million
bodies at finding the few, lasering our revenge
into a kind of love, the blood-hunger kept exact
and more convincing for its precision, an expression
of our belief that proximity is never the measure of guilt.
We've lived in the sky again for some years and today
on my lap these pictures from Iraq, naked bodies
stacked into a pyramid of ha-ha and the articles
about broomsticks up the ass and the limbs of children
turned into stubble, we are punch-drunk and getting even
with the sand, with the map, with oil, with ourselves
I think listening to the guys behind me. There's a problem
in Alpena with an inventory control system, some switches
are being counted twice, switches for what I don't know—
switches of humor, of faith—but the men are musical
in their jargon, both likely born in New Delhi
and probably Americans now, which is what the flesh
of this country has been, a grafted pulse, an inventory
of the world, and just as the idea of embrace
moves chemically into my blood, and I'm warmed
as if I've just taken a drink, a voice announces
we've begun our descent, and then I sense the falling.







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