I
And the sun behind the plume went out orange and then violet
then strong and bright at end of summer
flurries fell, the sun silvered the
flakes
there was a sound of fighter jets
My mother did not leave her house
when the cloud fell on
In her garden, on the evergreens, the powder silky and hot
She told me later that she understood
what was in it
II
They were asking for water on the bridges
the day already heating up
the exodus, the slow processions to
the ferries fleeing over the water
Ash on every shoulder and every head
whole ash men
smothered in plaster
silent without shirts
streaked with blood from glass
black women become albino
covering their mouths
in wet towels, bandannas, carpenter’s masks
They are trying to call home on cellphones
and the police are screaming No cellphones! Goddammit no cellphones!
III
I was told of the woman
who after the fall wore only a charred skirt and
a bra
and a suit-coat slipping off that a man had
given her
As they huddled in a door
she had burns on her thighs and her calves and
her arms
her cheeks bled warm
Someone cradled her and carried her away
I was told how the cloud fell straight down from the towers and
was breathing
how it was sentient, it moved like a being
and it spread darkness
There was no sound,
someone said, and you couldn’t outrun it and when you breathed it you choked
IV
The ambulances race south trailing ghosts of dust
over street corners where there are shoes
Oakton wingtips and Doc Martins and worn leather tongues and
and ground-down heels and some so old they’re
nearly treadless
lining up black as beetles and neat in stacks and
two by two
Cop shoes I keep hearing shield numbers on the air
a policeman says
and behind the gas-mask trembling, his eyes
V
In the green light of the leaves of the square by the
courthouse
a hundred frantic people driving nails into wood
plywood planks three feet wide and six long
the planks laid over two-by-fours and nailed
down, the boards
clattering and thrown and the arms
swinging up the hammers coming down
ancient noise of work, the laborers are men in
suits women in heels
students with packs the nailing sighs like ocean, crescendoes
for a moment two or three hammers out of six
dozen swing in straight musical time
making syncopations, the rhythms breaking as
quickly
and are just noise, horrid noise
The boards get tested
At each end where the two-by-fours poke out as
handles
a man and a woman take hold, another lies down on
the board, the bearers lift
they nod heads, the patient alights, the
stretchers are placed in piles
A man approached the work, wondering
and now under his breath (I could touch him) OmiGod louder: Oh my God
seeing how many stretchers already falling over
each other await the trucks and the trucks
coming with more two-by-fours and plywood boards
and there are rumors of 20,000 dead
bound for
And the man, as if a great hand had pulled him by the hair and
wrenched him
from behind, stumbled back four long feet and
crumpled under a tree heaving and dumb
VI
In the back of a flatbed truck
They wear the black long-coats and the white shirts and the sidelocks and beards
There are forty of them holding shovels and spades
The police wave aside the crowd
The truck passes
Someone asks Where are they
going?
Someone answers In
the religious Jews, the
Orthodox Jews
do a special job, they
retrieve body parts
to identify the people who
have died
VII
Into the fire zone at dusk with Vinnie
Dolan the thug who gypped me once
for ten dollars in a bar on the waterfront
that was a long time ago
we were much, much younger
Now he was looking for his father, a cop
He said his father was alright
I just wanna see him
my father and I we never
really saw eye to eye you know?
haven’t spoken to him in a while
And Vinnie apologized about the ten
dollars
I said
I hardly know you at all
but let’s stick together as we
go
Still at
in the purple summer dusk
We went to
At Pace the first triage had gone up early on
Dr. Morgenthal and his men and women
had water and food and blood and oxygen and
mounds of shiny equipment
Later Dr. Morgenthal would tell us We’re shutting down, moving south
We’re useless here There are no
patients
So Vinnie and I went south into the
Zone
with six medics who stuffed our packs
with gauze and saline and water and masks
who said We’ll set up at Ground Zero
Then it was darkness and men running saying Turn back, ‘s gonna collapse, turn the fuck
back!
The fires stirred winds through the canyons
kicking dust-devils and storms and stinging fog
yellow as deserts
four inches of ash on cars abandoned
the doors left open, and the wind blew a
million million paper bits
I ran the ash through my fingers, it was soft and warm and
almost dewy
It was concrete and stone and glass and drywall and lime and
asbestos
I didn’t yet know what my mother knew or I would never have
touched it so carelessly
for it was bone too
VIII
The longest night the firefighters had said
we had no idea what they meant
or how many they’d lost
until the first ruins of the towers rose before
us
like bombed churches in mist
little red fires at its heart
the cathedral windows
and we could hear the cries for surgeons among
the rubble
someone needed an amputation
Eyewashes! Eyewashes! the
medics cried out, fanning in teams of two
the firemen lay on curbs, in make-shift forward
triage units
set up in the halls of the Dow Jones Company
and American Express
old strange names now
The firemen thanked them, the saline
ran down like tears
and everywhere there were men alone
their throats hurting and their skin hot
and the medics did not cry Eyewashes!
for their hearts fell away seeing it
the rubble and the girders and the twisted
metal stretching into haze and dust
the gray drifts of millions of sheafs of paper
the ambulances, cars, firetrucks
smoking in the mud in paddies where the tangled
hoses had burst
or the water had streamed from the ruins
delicate charred lattice walls six
and ten stories high
Roman, white-pale steaming in arc-lights
or disappearing in purple plumes
the firemen trawling, stumbling,
falling, digging, blasting water
thousands of men in the twisted
sharpened warped metal
that flipped up underfoot like bear-traps, tore
at legs, popped into chests
It had a name, they called it the Pit and the Pile, it went,
you thought, for miles
IX
Or much later I'm sitting in a Japanese garden cleaning
paratrooper boots
wiping hard but the dried slurry of the ash won't
come loose
in fact as I wipe harder the white residue turns
heavy and bluish and soaks into my rag
soaking back into the boot, so as the boot dries
the white grows thicker
In the hedgerow maze by the marina the morgue ship lay in a
berth of light on the water
near a temple of palms and glass called the Winterdome
where there were gallerias, places to eat and buy
and buy
There was a bakery, the men were making cakes or bagels or
loaves, the fat yeast rose and fell
still with prints of fingers on hurt soft thighs,
old titties over shoulders
other uncooked loaves lay on trays abandoned,
neutron bombs took the cooks away
the coffee cups half-sugared -- Is this what
the end of man looks like?
In the galleria, shops bombed, sales bombed, glass in ariel pools or hanging from
ceilings
slow-drip on uncovered heads,
walking the black water, feet moving in liquid
mutterers in piss-soaked bathrooms
later tall and wise in the night, clear the way for new bodies
red sea openings of men for the processions in
uniforms correct and loving and of proper salute
a firefighter or cop found and then all stop
The men rough with their carving of the work with territorial
bare arms, the beards of soot
stop
The metallic Eiffel cranes, blind and intricate dancing with
tall dinosaur dances
stop
and tandem to these ancient
the lone men on the beams unbound from worldly awe of death’s kingdom
coughing their hard gems to throatful from old stomachs
stop
others only sleepwalkers in scows, backhoes,
bobcats, spraying weld fire
stop and with thousand-foot stare to the lights
of
that seemed lost and unknown and unknowable and
therefore: the work, the work
starts, again
And one among them, janitorial, ignored even the procession of
the famed dead
sweeping glass of seventeen windows
shattered into petals, behind him Venetian blinds clacking
as on seashores, the place suddenly unbruted by the sight of his quiet and his looking down
like looking for shells
Morning –
zero-hour, start over, me to sleep on a cot, herds of blank, all men’s makers
come to eat
drubbing of kegs rolling, trees torn from roots, gherrrkk scraping of dugs on gravel floors moos huts floods cartoons a faint ruckus of distant mobs Awake, this time in a coffin, with a tap-tap-tapping
of rain or men overhead, and the soft sway of a ship in port waters The morgue ship! Here!
The
Filling a great big stomach, the Pit
where we are removing the debris and put our own
cancelled eyes
in the cafeteria by the blown windows eat like hurt and unknown
doctors
moving among us, oxygen, oxygen
also
birdbaths in corners My third Puerto Rican shower this week Doctor, I can’t breath, I can’t
Forth comes the maiden Sara, 16,
strawberry blonde with the spaghetti trays
Who will stay for five days who I fell in love with and out of
all at once
XI
You
remember the people in these hours
though you spoke little, you knew very few names
Luke
who drove a day from
he cleared out his bank account to buy gauze and
bandages
Carl
the fireman
Jennifer
from the
given her by a cousin with big feet
She
faked being National Guard to pass the police lines
Within hours, cigarettes taste like burnt plaster and asbestos
and sometimes, oddly, human flesh; real
flavor someone joked
There were jokes
I just
found a firefighter on top of two women
Yeah, what was he doing?
The hounds and German shepherds are loosed
slipping the dust on girders,
sniffing
You watched the fleet-footed dogs nearly lose their balance
over voids twenty feet deep in the rubble
they descended into holes hissing
You watched men follow the dogs, crawling with
Vinnie Dolan did this again and again
raw and dazed and blank-eyed, spitting green
and black phlegm
He brought up three police officers, and at the end of it
the muscles in his cheeks went dead
I could not recognize him; he was pale and apart
The dogs came out and lay in the gardens by the marina
where K-9 cops gave them water bowls
and some of the dogs died eating
Along
the old thoroughfares, the Gristedes was quietly
looted
in these early hours when the volunteers were few, the
food supplies random
cops and firemen and EMTs took cigarettes, candy, water, chips, big boxes of
aspirin terrible headaches that night, it was the asbestos; you took what you
needed
zone of mud and ash, a scum of it white on everything
the trees looked like ice
and men in fatigues and gas masks
no refrigeration or electricity or running water
you thought to yourself that much of the planet lives
like this
you had no idea what city or country this was
Then
you saw cops in the abandoned Starbucks trying to make frappuccinos
in the health clubs they joked with barbells of ash
this same ash later in my bed
in
as sparkled and lonely as
dust from the moon
I
was given black body bags and Civil Defense body tags
to hand to the firemen as the dead were brought out,
the bodies a long time coming
I
carried baskets of water across the girders and rubble
tossed the bottles across chasms to wild men who caught
and drank them
then I returned, refilled the basket
The
men in groups of two and three dug
They
find flesh, they finger it, hold it up to
That’s skin they say matter-of-factly Think we got a body!
A
dozen men converge
new clues unearthed with hands and shovels
a white knit sweater shredded on tin
a pair of glasses, fully intact – incredible –
a Nike shoe
Got a shoe, Chief. Whaddaya think?
Body
could be a hundred feet away
The
dogs loitered, everywhere the smell of it
even the men hunkered with their noses, bending to
ground
I can smell it said a fireman Right here But he found nothing
There
would be firemen marching in the darkness in single file
looking like medieval warriors, carrying awls, pikes,
pick-axes, shovels on their shoulders
You
saw them planted in sleep on brown couches
pulled from the smashed windows of ground-floor offices
they had signs saying Dave’s Café Le Menu: 1) water 2) water
You
saw them in rows of stunned silence, soot-faced, white-eyed
And
you looked at them now as you would kings who had lost
you imagined it so, because you saw how big their
grief was
They’d
worked ten and twenty and forty hours in the rubble to forget it
to make something good of it, to find a man, a whole
man, give him a burial
perhaps find a survivor
At
he was a curly-haired young man tarred around his
eyes and red lipped
sleeping on his stomach with his arms over his head
laying very naturally except he had no buttocks or legs
The
men surrounded him, the firefighters pulled his head
up by his hair to show his face
turned him over, a coroner
Heavy rain made it hard for the rescuers in the days after
a wind rose from the sea and the rain fell faster
still the plume, its black arm, smoked over
When you looked at it from afar across the river
you thought it was the souls of men and women
it was greedy over the sky and foaming
it was a strange new neighbor
Vinnie Dolan and I watched the candle-lit streets,
the vigils
the people who wept and went away
A candle caught flame in a cup and fell on itself bending and
turning very bright
The light hiccupped and died
You find your dad?
That’s good
But it wasn’t true and whether Vinnie
was lying to me
or to himself did not matter
The truth was his father
died trying to save the dying in the fire
Vinnie searched and searched and searched
When there was no body
he told himself what he needed to hear
he had many things to say to his father
So he said
I drove in with him yesterday yeah
His
cheeks sucked in, I’m gonna
see him tonight
EPILOGUE
A year passes, there are wars, the horns in the air, the people come to ground zero
to watch through fences the unbuilding,
and at the year exactly, the families gather
for the reading of the names of the dead, which
the bag-pipers from
having marched across the boroughs all the night
now the reading of the names of
the dead in the wind off the river and the bay blowing them white
I was drunk at
thinking of Marcus Aurelius:
How quickly all things disappear, he
says,
In the universe, the bodies themselves…for
as soon as a thing has been seen
it is carried away and another comes in its place, and this will
be carried away too.
And then Marcus, good emperor of
-fin-