A series I wrote days after the events of 9/11//2001, as a response to the terror I was and those around me were experiencing (especially those of us who had been working within a short walk to the WTC) at the time, originally appearing in American Letters & Criticism, volume 15. These will also be included in my forthcoming collection Second Nature (Spuyten Duyvil) , due out this fall.
SEPTEMBER VARIATIONS 1. Sun sets over the eastern blank Fill in the remainder where The square lacks least Lacks leaks. We are a bubble coming in over the west. Our geography is neutral, catacombed. Inside our separateness drenched angels of division go, ideologies blurred. Sun shreds you to dreads and makes them part of a party. Let’s get in on the rest. The rest of guts and gets. The startled watchman. He sparkles in the crusted cavalcades 2. Or so you have the irritant in your eye—so sharp it’s warming. The final. You. Marching with vapor hammers we sway. Bend buttresses. Shards of concrete surround my clothes. The air. The final sentence in a book of gloves. The skin removed as the gloves are drawn. Hands found neatly bound in a mound of debris. We took them as a souvenir to a place made out of wind and smoke. There was a fire in the elevator and we stomped it. Windows changing shape, form reinventing every- body was happy. Everyb- ody in the curve. Around corners piles of books smoldering And the warmth provided thus 3. Never say never. Never say today was If you’d really like to gain access—your burning thoughts—chew immediately The sound of light entering the square The descriptive feelings abstracting your senses. This is the meant and toneless vent of night. Night in the sentence, as when the syntax distributes the things as they are gives up. The work of the world bound easily, spun lazily around a freckle in the dirt. We might think we flood the hall with operatic rosebuds, but see toy soldiers milking toy sheep and urinating on the plaza. The wreckage rising in stone and steel like a plaintiff forgetting his amnesia. Absolving with a movie and a warm milk a freckle heated in the microwave. Eyes hanging out to dry. Flooding Windows. Patch this dream with stars. 4. As is the fashion. As is. Aziz and Hamlet alone together on the square. Cab drivers and infantry men. Sailors squandering their money. Truck drivers on the plaza, the plaza buckling up. Aziz biting into his ham sandwich Not one honey trader. Random axe in Hamlet’s hand his eyes staring off, confused with themselves, confused with seeing What word can be used to describe this this this moving this gesturing around the way the outer world describes the inner somewhat striptease. Aziz sneezes into Hamlet’s handkerchief as Hamlet loses sense of himself The motion picture steps in. Closer but the narrating voice hisses to a halt. The skies burp. Aziz and Hamlet are covered with each other’s lunch. Freeze frame 5. A daring glister portends and a seizure climbs up the banister ambidextrously Or so the Manhattan skyline preambles back and forth against the gray till splitting its bandages it blends in dearly with itself a dog or pile of rocks broken across its face