What we don't forget

A poem about the persistence of 9/11

Photo by Gary Lopater on Unsplash

I wrote this in 2011. A decade had passed; there was still a poem to be written.

---

YEARS LATER, ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE COUNTRY



1.  Airplanes

When they pass low, loom larger
than toy-size overhead, I breathe deep

and watch them across the sky until
their route confirms itself; southeast

descending to the airport, west and rising
over the Pacific, the everyday

predicted paths of flight.  As if my gaze
compelled their altitude and bearings,

signaled them safe away from skyline,
bridges, horror; as if the act of bearing

witness -– nothing taken for granted –- 
changes what happens, even when nothing does.



2.  Dust

Made mostly of human skin cells,
they tell us, with some street grit mixed in,

and while I flick a layer of my discarded self
from books, piano, desk, I wonder how the housekeepers

managed in that other city, all those weeks
when so much was discarded, when the street grit

was ashen, when every dust-cloth became
a reliquary, a memento mori.



3.  Firehouse

Morning and night, on my way into 
the world and on my way home, I pass

the two-engine house, its flagpole the tallest
elevation on our block, and when its flag

is at half-mast, I often know why; if not,
I tell myself to read the news more closely

for another story of fire (often) and courage,
for the name and last response of another

first responder.  Some mornings, though, I picture
someone in that house waking in grey dawn light

on fire with memory, getting up before the others
to run the colors down to mourning-height, 

then shivering in the smoke of early fog,
heading indoors again to start the coffee.



4.  Distance

In 1989, last time the earth shook really hard
in San Francisco, I was camped two hundred miles 

inland on the granite Sierras with my father and sister, 
and when we came out of the hills to my father’s house

and heard the four day’s news of rubble, flames, a broken
bridge, my sister and I tossed dusty gear pell-mell

into her car, headed west and south and home as fast
as her good sense would let her drive -- and, arriving, found

the normal city traffic, crumbled plaster and window glass
on my apartment floor, a small brave street-fair humming 

outside, and everyone telling stories, the same ones,
over and over again.

                                         Eighteen years later, when
my sister called me from our father’s house

to tell me where she had found his body and what
she had done next, and that there was no need

for me to catch a bus north, she would drive home
the next day -– when we hung up, what I felt most,

of all there was to feel, was the wish to be there,
in a house I had never wished to visit while

my father lived, in case at this late date there might
be some need after all.

			                   And though I have never 
traveled to Manhattan, or toured the Pentagon, 

or driven through Shanksville, though I know no one 
who died that day those years ago, though being present

that day, God knows, would have changed
exactly nothing, still, then and odd days since,

I have watched myself standing quiet, a safe distance
from catastrophe, and longed for any skill,

any strength that might excuse my filling space
reserved for survivors, any witness to bear

to help them bear survival, any answer
for the unreasoned conviction that chokes

me like dust, flaps in my brain like a mourning flag:
I should have been there.  I should be there now.

---

[You can listen to an audio reading of the poem using the little widget above the photograph.]

We have done what we can to accommodate the memory of it. We have raised monuments and new buildings. We have found an innocuous name for the date, one we can print on calendars. We have, oddly (or maybe it’s not so odd), begun to use it as a metric to measure other losses, other catastrophes: every day, or week, or month, as many killed by this new disaster as died on 9/11.

When we are extra brave, or extra despairing, we may talk to each other about the lies and violence that the events of that day were used to justify. Sometimes we can list the things we have learned since it happened; other times, we’re not sure we’ve learned a thing.

Mostly, we remember. Mostly, we listen to each other’s stories, and tell our own.