BEFORE THE TOWERS FELL

 

New York that summer was a city half-hidden

behind miles of scaffolding, everything seemingly

being sandblasted, repainted, and refitted,

every rooftop and arch, every window

reaching upward toward a sky of shifting blue,

strangely calm above the grime and clatter of it all.

Walls of glass reflected the bodies of workers,

like the saints framed in the windows of

the crumbling cathedral across from our hotel.

Mostly I remember walking, from one borough

to the next, the city blocks so brief compared to those

seemingly endless boulevards of the Midwest,

the sights, sounds, and smells of a dozen countries

around every corner. I remember stopping for

lunch at the Empire Diner, drinks at the KGB,

remember the famous dancer that you recognized

from a movie sliding gracefully into an SUV,

as though part of a larger routine which no one

on the street had been made aware of.

We walked with aching hips and bandaged heels,

as though tourism was, in fact, as serious

a sport as any, as if youth demanded motion.

Tonight, on yet another bleak anniversary,

I listen, with the others, to the silence, gazing up

at those blue columns of light, as though

they were somehow holding up the sky itself;

I think of the two we once were... before.

Such a small and simple word that must bear,

against all odds, the weight of the unimaginable.

Were we walking into the past all along,

the evening sun beside us reflected a thousand

different ways, yet impossible to pin down?

When did distance itself become destination,

our paths reaching, like those long pillars

of light, separately, into what we could not say?

Where, dear friend, did we go?

FIRST GRADE

 

The autumn moved in seemingly overnight,

its gray and watery chill seeping through

the windows while we slept. Suddenly,

the glittering Ferris wheel of the State Fair

has stopped for yet another year,

the green of lawns and hills grows less certain,

the leaves already folding in on themselves

like small hands clutching at the air;

and we stand, my daughter, her mother,

and me, in the hallway of this new school,

the light strangely familiar, as though bottled

from decades past and just opened again.

Our daughter is smiling but nervous,

her suntanned arms at her sides as she turns

with uncertainty, chin held tightly against her chest,

as if trying to find a doorway into herself.

But she turns instead toward this classroom,

her backpack comically large, her bag of supplies

so heavy that she pulls it at her side;

and we, her parents, turn with the ringing

of the bell, so startling in its insistence,

to leave, as ever, in our separate directions.

But of course we, too, are being pulled

forward, together, into all that we could not

have planned, the beauty, the boredom,

and wonder of this great unknown.

THE ANIMAL PHILOSOPHER

 

Walking with my young daughter to school,

she asks, seemingly out of nowhere,

"What are words anyway?

They don't mean anything, really.

What is a girl, or a tree, or the ocean?

To an animal, the words we use are just

sounds like any other sound."

And I, who have spent the better part

of a lifetime believing in the beauty

and possibility of language, of building these

small temples of measured sound,

can offer no reasonable defense against

such a pure distillation of truth.

Have I been exposed as a mere hack,

a mild mannered charlatan? I am strangely,

secretly wounded when she throws

out the question of ages: "Why are we here?

No one knows. The animals would know

because they were here long before humans.

We can't really understand their language

yet; but we could learn if we listened."

Which is all her father, poor simpleton, can

manage today, tagging along, listening

to all that we need not say.