Wall Street Rising

9/11/01: 

the sun sets finally on this longest of days, and still they come, some hundred blocks later, the dazed and suited walking home from their former offices, and when the subway thunders below they look up, thinking airplane, unable to trust any transportation but their own sooted shoes

9/11/02: 

the perfume I ordered without smelling has arrived, C'est Rien que du Bonheur

not so sure, I pack my bag: blank notebook, a magazine article I intend to read near Ground Zero on how the World Trade Center came to be, Metrocard, one ride left, that will take me to the southernmost tip from which I'll walk my way back home like they did,

the living

are you lost? a man asks, demoting me to tourist as I search the bankish lobbies for an anomalous art exhibit called Wall Street Rising

if these works had scent it would be the raspberry/grass/violet mix on my wrist, all sweet pastel blobs and in need of a toothbrush

how can anyone claim, today, that there is nothing but happiness, that those tucked naked bodies in Spencer Tunick's photograph simply mimic the pink Chinatown lanterns above their heads, giggling-like

(here I would insert question marks if I believed in punctuation, or sentences for that matter)

the wind makes the first exhibit, One New York Plaza, almost impossible to infiltrate; lifts three women at once and tosses them down the stairs, oblivious to their skirts and heels and hose, now ripped; orchestrates their paperwork into a taunting dance; and all we witnesses can do is grip a railing and remember, whether or not we actually witnessed it, how the paperwork did that dance last year

how the man in the documentary said you could stand there and just read these inter-office memos fluttering in front of your face

how, like the paper, some people took flight

as if they had a choice

(this is a weird poem to write, I think, even as the lines take shape)

not today, I say, as if the weather is supposed to abide our mood, but it is, isn't it

I read a review about an artist (conceptual, of course) who likes to tell a story about a suicide jumper who does a perfect triple flip on his way down from the twelfth floor, imagine being that graceful, in the space between in and out

as if we could

control

the ruins don't remind me of the ancient Acropolis and how they seemed to mount and haunt, this instead is a hole only the IDed have access to, a longing for the bladder ache of bagpipes to fill it with some appropriate feeling

the dirt blown could very well contain bits of bone and blood and steel and soft parts,

hard

to tell if the city is crying or just removing something from its eyes

(beautiful things, too, it is true: the way the memorial tiles people have painted make a chime of the fence; the school children and their sidewalk of chalked butterflies, until future rain aways)

to the homeless man I offer a cigarette, but when a pack of matches refuses to light, I leave him with this useless thing and he tells me he loves me regardless

not again, not today, when I encounter Caution Do Not Cross tape surrounding a Columbus Circle construction site and don't know whether to look up or down

the wind, says the officer, knocked a section of wood and metal scaffolding from the top of the would-be building, killing someone, I will find out on the news when I get home

how human mimics weather mimics human

not today, yet how not

and what the weather won't do, we'll do ourselves, even  

if that means:

fly