roadside between open fields on top of a hill,
I gaze east and up at November’s mute fires,
magnesium streaks quick-etched across the night,
their glowing trails hanging like tiny hosannas of light
before dissolving back to heaven. Farther from earth,
satellites zip from horizon to horizon in silent orbit.
On the cold wind, a soft whiff of nitrates and damp soil
swirls with wood fire smoke from nearby farm houses.
The distant low roar of a passenger jet rises and falls.
Somewhere, a dog barks at deer shuffling through
the corn stubble. Minute under the vast and endless
river of stars, I watch with gratitude as sparks shoot
from the Lion’s mane, heavenly travelers hurtling
through the darkness of time to crash hot to earth,
brief glories scratching the hours like static, fading
swift as dreams the moment we wake. Their ions,
like knowledge, linger to tease, then are gone.
Toward Pittsburgh
Night falls between mountain ridges,
open car windows and headlights on,
lullaby of tiresong beside cow farms,
faded Mail Pouch Tobacco billboard
painted on the side of an old barn.
Fragrant alfalfa breath of summer
darkness settles like gossamer hands
enfolding a postage-stamp grass meadow,
edge of the woods by the interstate
south of Breezewood and the Turnpike;
U2’s “Promenade” pulses low on the car stereo,
and you, behind the wheel, steady as years.
Light by quiet light, Edward Hopper’s America
nestles into its small, white, box houses,
blue glow of computer and TV screens
spilling out through upstairs bedroom curtains.
Slide show, seaside town. Coca-cola, football radio,
radio, radio, radio, radio, radio …
Thin fog hugs the farm fields’ edges;
fireflies glitter the treetops:
hold this moment, a little longer.
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
Dundee Creek
Motionless over a meadow of bay grass,
the kayak’s hull is tickled by mossy
leaves waving in tidal currents. Fish
jumps, circles fan out. Poplar trunks,
cattails; two power plant smokestacks
striped red and white tower over the marsh.
Signs along the Proving Ground shore warn
trespassers against unexploded ordnance,
as all the wars waged against others
are first waged against ourselves.
Blue heron stalks the grenade shallows;
men cast lines into dangerous depths.
Minnows scatter when paddle blades
slice the brackish calm.
Columbia3
High atmosphere space bounce
in transit beneath dawn moon’s pallid glow,
galactic dazzle and dream talk breaking up
as ambient creatures return on earthbound comet.
Human particles once alive with love
and skill and care skip across ozone–
inside becomes outside nanoseconds at a time.