story8616.xml

story8616.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-11-04

Compass


We marked four winds by an acrid smoke,

Smoke first black, then white,

Driven across East River and New York Harbor,

Carried east across Brooklyn Heights, then south over Staten Island,

Out over the Narrows, down the shore, up Long Island, out to sea,

Carried north over Central Park, over Harlem, Washington Heights,

Over and into the Bronx, over and into Connecticut beyond,

Carried west over Hudson, raking up and down New Jersey

Palisades, Fort Lee to Bayonne.



Over all was blown this marvel, a dark compass in the sky.

We saw it from a hill in Green-Wood, by Tiffany?s tomb,

Acorns, catkins, catalpa fruit littering the manicured grass,

Along with charred memos, letters, and newsprint

All covered, all covered with thankless ash?



In this ash, ashes, the ordinary become SOS, the truth of what was

And what is.



Upon the ashes of that work

Is our work?

Begun when theirs ended?

In smoke and ash,



Twisted steel, exploded glass,

When our towers, one after the other,

Shuddered and collapsed,

Exhausted.



???



Engine 205



Those who know that work is love

know that this work is great love,

work done in the face of death

in defiance, in respect,

true work, true love, sacrifice--

lives for love, living for love.



Ladder 118



How will DNA tell us

Whose hand grasped axe to free trapped

Clerks in elevator shafts?

Or which hand steered fatal jet?



Or whose feet bore the weight of

Boots, belt, air tank and helmet

Up and down flights of stairs and

Into the lighted pyre.



Will the DNA tell us

Who loved to dance, though he danced

Badly?Or which plotted to

Undo dancer in mid-dance?



Or who, could he speak once more,

Would surely ask, ?May I have

The next dance??



???



Restless and Unsleeping


I thought it raged somewhere else?

Twister hop scotching Kansas,

Flood drowning Minnesota?



Always, always, somewhere else.



But it was racing across

Cloudless skies, down calm East Coast,

As arsonist, as human



Bomb, as some demented god.



And from a cell phone inside

We got our answer to Where,

When he said, The fire is here.



???



The Blind Man?s Guide


There is no path; there is no road,

That we have made that leads away

From doors in flame, from glass-shard floors,

Guide dog no use but to stay close.



But to presume a path will appear,

First to blind feet, then to scorched hands,

Each step borne by that presumption?



That foot will find fall after fall,

Descending the obscure staircase

Long minute after long minute

Until a familiar embrace,

Merely imagined up to now,

Saying you are home?



Brings you home.



???



Labore est orare


To retrieve the fallen,

To remove the wreckage,

And leave, leaving this field

Better than we found it.



???



Harbor



Out the office, hale and clean pressed

or broken limbed, ash covered

into a waiting boat, one of hundreds

tugs, tankers, water taxies, ferries

evacuating downtown Manhattan

out from under the smoke, going in by radar

at high speed, Staten Island Ferry up to 800 rpm

carrying 6,000 passengers one way -- out --

urgent, determined, clear

that nobody should be sitting down



that we couldn't think of any place else

we'd rather be



F-16's knife through breaks in the black billowing

close down over harbor -- We didn't know

whose they were -- and on the Hudson damned

if it wasn't the Half Moon

just sitting there in the haze --

almost 400 years to the day

Hudson first penetrated New York Harbor --

a replica with nothing to do

on busiest day in harbor since Melville.



???



Barges



The dream, the disturbing part of it, was it

presented itself

As presentment?



Two rows of barges longer than the stadium

Slowly moving from Manhattan

Leaving a lane in between for her ferry,

Heading in the opposite direction to terminal,

Each barge pushed by a tug, each tug with a wheelhouse,

In each wheelhouse the same silent skipper chomping

On cigar, eyes focused straight ahead, beyond

The wreckage?



When it was a memory of something

She?d seen in the papers.






Bargemen



He said, At first the barges were filled with rebar,

Which always had some cement attached.

There were crows and seagulls everywhere.

I didn?t know crows ate cement.



???



I thought I?d read more?



I took this job so a young man

Wouldn?t have to hold

Such memories?



Was only my imagination.



???



Ferryman



And again, thought I'd dreamt I'd gone over to see

how they were doing, the ones I'd ferried in from Jersey --

ants on a hill

digging, digging, digging --

but was daydreaming over something I'd read.

Thought I knew their names, they mine.

It was ebb tide, my grasp loosening,

even the smoke getting sucked out to sea.



???



Steamfitter



Steamfitter says he used to line up pilings he was driving

with twin towers.

Harder now, that hard job, harder ―

harder but doable.