It might Be Said
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This poem is dedicated to the memory of my late husband, the actor David Dukes,
who died on this day one year ago—and to all those who perished in the September 11th tragedy in New York City. The place where private grief joins the public community of sorrow is the place where (I hope) this poem resides. This poem contains an image which was given to me by someone who was in the Pentagon at the time of the attack: the pedestal upon which a dictionary lay open, standing in the rubble. When steel disintegrates, when metal wings tipped with insignia explode into flame, when the glittering columns buckle and fall inward… the mind interrogates the particular for relief. But the young woman turning to the coffee-maker to fill her second cup, the bond trader flashing a thumbs-up at the monitor, the fire- fighter lifting the charred body in his arms—all become ash at the same instant. It might be said that nothing permanent is left of them. It might be said that nothing permanent is left but our grief, which is ever-lasting in its sustaining contradictions. In the shrine of consciousness they live as they lived before—but out of grief, out of the rubble of reason grow the bitter twins of insight: We are always alone as we die. We are never alone as we die. Framed and fleeting, as the literal windows at which they will not reappear, waving— the actual doorways through which they will never again walk—we see them. Then the other figure who comes forward, lifting a hand in benediction. At the torchlit street corner, intersection of faith and conscience— someone attempting to bless us walks beneath the wrap-around head-lines: No god we can worship asks for violence in his name. No human heart can thrive without forgiveness— what is self-evident recovers itself at last, at cost. At the sign of falling ash, the sign of each sought-after loved face, at the sign of the rose—the rose of flame in which they have perished—they will be buried, as the poet says, under our eyelids. We will see them in succession, permanently turning, flashing a thumbs-up, permanently setting the rose in the glass vase on the desktop on the ninetieth floor: Its flaming petals unfolding in the blue September morning of the new brutal century. In the single instant, the predictable becomes impossible—petals fall. He was loved. She was loved. They were loved. In the center of Strategic Command, the crash site, stands the pedestal On which the lexicon lies open in the smoking ruins. Turn to their names: Alpha, Omega. Turn to their names, God of Ash, God of Roses. Enter their names in the disappearing Book of Records. It might be said That we enter this world disappearing—and disappear At last into language, into the poem of blessing, into the unstoppable fountain of each name revived. Each name the only name among the many our souls receive— in that other world, where it might be said, we are called infinite, we are called Blessing, Contradiction, we are called Little Afterwards, we are called Loved. |
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