Remembering September 11

N.B. -- this was written on 9/19/01 and published not long after in the now defunct Boulder Arts Paper. Thanks to Jennifer Heath for running it.

Psalm 9.11


"All my pretty ones?
Did you say all?
What, all
At one fell swoop?"


1.

Gone

Sun in triage, gone

Wilderness of smoke –
hoop of blasted

[ ]

O gone

deluge I am
going to the end

Speech of madness
that would extinguish every name

Calamity that crushes us into
prayer

Into
make my silence
a flame that won’t
go out


2.

Cold water
for the laving
of wounds

Colder
than the surface
of the moon

Under cloud
they fall
they turn

Pour cold water
on their eyes
the dead who burn


3.

Weep
it’s OK to burn

Write
it’s OK to weep

Blank
to the furthest
horizon

What is
living

What is
tide

becomes us in a sweep
of grass, grace


4.

The sundering boom gapes
Who spills, who folds, who falls away

Dust is air, washing over
Is no water &
the beauty of their forms

skyline escarpment stutters,

it is evening—zoom to limb
to house, to rosary

Hell is
sunlight on the toe
of a shoe

Ich bin Ich bin Ich bin
Be all my sins remembered


5.

By the waters of X
I sat down and.

Cold wind
from the furnace
of broken syllables.


6.

Ship this whisper
as music

Be here lovely inside shadow
ache together under storm

the dead are forever
the meaning of any

moment held to
& dissolved


7.

And the point in the spectrum
where all lights become one

announces only
itself.

Beyond
that no one holds

the lone lumen
of stone

but stands
inside
a room

the sound of a voice
at the end

who will mark
my love

when she goes?

Who will stay?


8.


And dropped each
one
down

Past reach
of dire lyre

Song now gone
flume consuming

Tasked by
blast

Unknot
the clot
of living

Wind burn gasp

All peace ceases
out of doom
resumed

Catastrophe
blaze
apostrophe

O
day open

O
open day


9.


Yet say this also:

After saying everything
everything
remains to be said