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Terror in the Dust

September, streets capsizing,

spilling over, down the drain.

Shards of glass, splinters like rain

–U2, “Please”

It is more than any one of us can bear.

On a cloudless, warm day, burning people

drop from windows spewing smoke,

each tiny face reconciled with death,

falling one hundred stories through the air.

An upside-down business man, arms at his sides

and legs straight, tie flapping in the wind;

a man and woman holding hands. Americans.

Americans–pelting the concrete like hail.

On the ground, a fireman sees his colleague

crushed by a falling body. Airline passengers,

human shrapnel in the hands of madmen,

land blocks away still strapped to their seats.

Then time itself melts before our eyes

in a pyroclastic, nightmare roar, leaving

behind a hole in the sky.

It is more than any one of us can bear.

Ashen clouds of pulverized concrete

billow through the canyons of Manhattan,

sprinkling the powdered lives of thousands

on the helmets of saints who choke in the morning

twilight on asbestos plumes and vaporized marble,

on the odor of death and melted steel.

Crushed cars are buried to their roofs in debris.

A million reams of paper drift on subway steps

as the wind scatters DNA all the way to Brooklyn.

A tooth, an arm, a hair; a wedding finger glinting in the dust.

Fragments of life in the unimaginable tonnage of loss.

To a poet, there is terror in the dust.1

Blinking red lights in kitchens across the globe:

cell phones carried their voices–

desperate goodbyes left behind on answering machines.

We wear their names like heart attack scars,

endure the terrible day like victims of rape.

It is more than any one of us can bear.

Words move into the shadows and vanish;

memory returns in an echo of silence.

There are times when the spirit freezes,

feels dead as bleached wood

and dry as a riverbed in drought.

For a way out, we search the depths of our souls

for a spirit; beg for a vital sign of life.2

We are given only this:

Outside in the lush, late summer afternoon,

the first yellow leaves of autumn

flutter gently to the ground.

Baltimore

September 11, 2001