September 11

Coming out of the subway at Chambers—

World Trade Center, the sky blue, crystal blue,

not a cloud in it, primed, deeply moving.

Lower Manhattan stretched out like an island

in a sea of light in a perfect ocean.

Not a ripple from the river to the sea—

a real beauty, I want to return to this world.

 

All suddenly changed with a loud roar then a bang.

A half mile away was a gaping hole in the North Tower.

Then smoke.

 

I saw the fall of the falling man beyond reach.

A silver streak crossed the Hudson.

Another hurled missile maligned the South Tower

in the manner not repeated here.

Nothing anyone would want to believe in.

 

Evacuation was spontaneous, without thought.

We merged into the chaos on the streets, the shock,

sadness.  Making our way in waves to the Williamsburg

because the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges had closed,

then it too closed behind, after a colleague and I helped

a collapsed officer to her feet as she listened to the chaos

on a police radio, she said over and over:

“They’re gone.  They’re all gone.”

 

We didn’t know the North Tower collapsed

until we looked back from the bridge

to see a void.

 

On the bridge I was struck by a group of students

who seemed to think it was all just funny.

Something about respect, entitlement,

the manners of youth?

In short, I thought I saw callous indifference;

then maybe that’s not what they meant, after all.

It is impossible to say.

But they laughed as the South Tower collapsed.

 

You were suddenly aware of the smoke and grey dust

rising into the sky… billowing curtains of immense solidity.

The sky a lump of crystal spaced by voids,

the distant view.

I shall always ponder that empty space.

Death and death again.

 

I walked my way to Queens with the cargo I possessed—

fear, apprehension, vividly etched as the sun went down,

with the darkness that deepened as if it might be

traversed by mere escape.

I was walled in.  Going deeper, deeper,

down strange darkening avenues into the unlit world.

I am not part of these streets.

Wanting one thing in particular, precisely,

to urgently make it home.  What gives me safety,

surrounded by sleep, and forgetful sleep.

And evenings so peaceful smoothed by sleep.

Tired and asleep.

 

The stream of time is interrupted when one tortuous

moment seems endless, does not lead to a new beginning.

When all are only violent cinders of things once splendid.

Sometimes I wish I could doubt the story

that is all truth and darkness—a world only made

of moments that forever roar chaos and horror.

.

Today the sun has not yet gone out.

The world does not collapse.

There is yet the eternal summer and the silence

of all that was lost, it is not fiction or forgotten.

Nor a gulf I can pass… this is where I stand;

here, holding the memory.  I am glad to remember,

despite punishing demands of the present

exacerbated by our relentless modern world.

 

Grant another day.  Another rare invulnerable day

torn off the calendar back to the beginning

of the first day of a new school term

and other streaming moments are about to start,

fostering all the softness time presumes,

and aesthetics I relate to closely.

 

Give back to the day its light,

to the world its measures of color,

the trees their green, the air its songs from deep within.

Let it all unfold whole to replace the crippled space

that stays in me.  I do not want to live in a world

when light broke the clock, and air strikes

around you like a spider’s web of light

in the incandescent depth of blue.

 

Despite harsh thoughts coerce my heart.

Above all return to the world its beauty.

I assume a gentle infinite world, all synthesis.

Reveal the complete works of Whitman, Melville, Poe,

of Rachel Carson, Merwin and Mary Oliver…

magnificently presented, suitably inscribed.

Life is the beginning, I give myself to its rapture

bound to that poetry.

 

It is a thin dream.  The absurdity is sublime.

I am aware of our ephemeral passage.

Time, that relentless force, blows all to diamond dust.

You cannot go on cutting memories with a knife,

but so much was destroyed.  So many souls gone—

such a senseless vulgar act.

 

I stand by the waters trembling shore at the bright

streaming edge of the world.

September’s sky pours deep blue into the shadows

where time falls, tapered to a point with mechanical precision.

The refraction of light opening, sharp as an unresolved cry.

I shall keep rolling the darkness before me to my dying day.

Perfect clarity.  Nothing wasted;

I will not impose my arbitrary design.

 

When voices are silent, I remember.

When the world moves past me, it’s inevitable,

I am moving too, possess it all, and I remember.

 

 

Stephen Cipot

Garden City Park