WHEN THE TOWERS FELL by Galway Kinnell From our high window we saw the towers with their bands and blocks of light brighten against a fading sunset, saw them at any hour glitter and live as if the spirits inside them sat up all night calculating profit and loss, saw them reach up to steep their tops in the until then invisible yellow of sunrise, grew so used to them often we didn’t see them, and now, not seeing them, we see them. The banker is talking to London. Humberto is delivering breakfast sandwiches. The trader is already working the phone. The mail sorter has started sorting the mail. ...povres et riches ...poor and rich Sages et folz, prestres et laiz Wise and foolish, priests and laymen Nobles, villains, larges et chiches Noblemen, serfs, generous and m Petiz et grans et beaulx et laiz Short and tall and handsome and homely The plane screamed low down lower Fifth Avenue lifted at the Arch, someone said, shaking the dog walkers in Washington Square Park, drove for the north tower, struck with a heavy thud, releasing a huge bright gush of blackened fire, and vanished, leaving a hole the size and shape a cartoon plane might make if it had passed harmlessly through and were flying away now, on the far side, back into the realm of the imaginary. Some with torn clothing, some bloodied, some limping at top speed like children in a three-legged race, some half dragged, some intact in neat suits and dresses, they straggle out of step up the avenues, each dusted to a ghostly whiteness, their eyes rubbed red as the eyes of a Zahoris, who can see the dead under the ground. Some died while calling home to say they were O.K. Some died after over an hour spent learning they would die. Some died so abruptly they may have seen death from within it. Some broke windows and leaned out and waited for rescue. Some were asphyxiated. Some burned, their very faces caught fire. Some fell, letting gravity speed them through their long moment. Some leapt hand in hand, the elasticity in last bits of love-time letting — I wish I could say — their vertical streaks down the sky happen more lightly. At the high window, where I’ve often stood to escape a nightmare, I meet the single, unblinking eye lighting the all-night sniffing and lifting and sifting for bodies, pieces of bodies, anything that is not nothing, in a search that always goes on somewhere, now in New York and Kabul. She stands on a corner holding up a picture of her husband. He is smiling. In today’s wind shift few pass. Sorry sorry sorry. She startles. Suppose, down the street, that headlong lope... or, over there, that hair so black it’s purple... And yet, suppose some evening I forgot The fare and transfer, yet got by that way Without recall — lost yet poised in traffic. Then I might find your eyes... It could happen. Sorry sorry good luck thank you. On this side it is “amnesia,” or forgetting the way home, on the other, “invisibleness,” or never in body returning. Hard to see clearly in the metallic mist, or through the sheet of mock reality cast over our world, bourne that no creature ever born pokes its way back through, and no love can tear. The towers burn and fall, burn and fall — in a distant, shot, smokestacks spewing oily earth remnants out of the past. Schwarze Milch der Fruhe wir trinken sie abends Black milk of daybreak we drink it at nightfall wir trinken sie mittags und morgens wir trinken sie nachts we drink it at midday at morning we drink it at night wir trinken und trinken We drink it and drink it This is not a comparison but a corollary, not a likeness but a lineage in the twentieth-century history of violent death — black men in the South castrated and strung up from trees, soldiers advancing through mud at ninety thousand dead per mile, train upon train headed eastward made up of boxcars shoved full to the corners with Jews and Gypsies to be enslaved or gassed, state murder of twenty, thirty, forty million of its own, atomic blasts wiping cities off the earth, firebombings the same, death marches, starvations, assassinations, disappearances, entire countries turned into rubble, minefields, mass graves. Seeing the towers vomit these black omens, that the last century dumped into this one, for us to dispose of, we know they are our futures, that is our own black milk crossing the sky: wir shaufeln ein Grab in den Luften da liegt man nicht eng we’re digging a grave in the sky there’ll be plenty of room to lie down there Burst jet fuel, incinerated aluminum, steel fume, crushed marble, exploded granite, pulverized drywall, mashed concrete, berserked plastic, gasified mercury, cracked chemicals, scoria, vapor of the vaporized — wafted here from the burnings of the past, draped over our island up to streets regimented into numbers and letters, breathed across the great bridges to Brooklyn and the waiting sea: astringent, miasmic, empyreumatic, slick, freighted air too foul to take in but we take it in, too gruesome for seekers of the amnesiac beloved to breathe but they breathe it and you breathe it. A photograph of a woman hangs from a string at his neck. He doesn’t look up. He stares down at the sidewalk of flagstone slabs laid down in Whitman’s century, gutter edges rasped by iron wheels to a melted roundedness: a conscious intelligence envying the stones. Nie staja sie, sa. They do not become, they are. Nie nad to, myslalem. Nothing but that, I thought, zbrzydziwszy sobie now loathing within myself wszystko co staje sie everything that becomes. And I sat down by the waters of the Hudson, by the North Cove Yacht Harbor, and thought how those on the high floors must have suffered: knowing they would burn alive, and then, burning alive. and I wondered, Is there a mechanism of death that so mutilates existence no one gets over it not even the dead? Before me I saw, in steel letters welded to the steel railing posts, Whitman’s words written as America plunged into war with itself: City of the world!... Proud and passionate city — mettlesome, mad, extravagant city! words of a time of illusions. Then I remembered what he wrote after the war was over and Lincoln dead: I saw the debris and debris of all the dead soldiers of the war, But I saw they were not as was thought. They themselves were fully at rest — they suffer’d not, The living remain’d and suffer’d, the mother suffer’d And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer’d... In our minds the glassy blocks succumb over and over into themselves, slam down floor by floor into themselves. They blow up as if in reverse, exploding downward and outward, billowing through the streets, engulfing the fleeing. As each tower goes down, it concentrates into itself, transforms itself infinitely slowly into a black hole infinitesimally small: mass without space, where each light, each life, put out, lies down within us.
Posted on: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 12:32:09 +0000
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