8:45 and Elsewhere

Note: Begun in the fall of 2001, and completed almost three years later, 8:45 and Elsewhere is a sequence commemorating the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and the season that followed.



I

These twilit evenings, the twilight’s intense:
Looking out over the parking lot’s frown,
You feel beyond the trees a humming of sky
Not like bees, but like a whisper of intent
In a language that you can’t quite place.
Where is the morning when that certainty of sky,
So blue that its blueness could not be imagined,
Glimpsed before a flutter of pigeons flew off,
Defined Tuesday morning, a somnolent clock?
All of those Tuesdays have been defaced:
Long shadows gap-tooth the grass near the fence.

II

The sun was what I expected
During that long, nervous childhood
When the radio antennas
Cranked, clawing at the sky;
The songs that dreaded the sun
Never dreamed a dread mundane
Could ignite a billion fears.

Late in the afternoon,
As the talking heads buzzed on,
My thumb spoke up for silence.
A drive down to the reservoir
Seemed like the thing to do.
Ducks moved in rippling water,
Small fishes swam in synchro,
The quiet itself spoke eloquently
Of smoke on three horizons:
The lake fire-danced with sun.

Then bright night, humming loud:
White noise drowned out the stars;
Sense came down with the cities.
Monday’s clear-text: Tuesday’s garble.
In half a million tons there smoked
Remnants of a collective reach,
100-plus channels of helplessness
Adding speechlessness to speech.
Groping for words from long ago,
I think of the belly of a cloud.

The view from the Narrows:
Yellow fog drifts over the battery,
Then, on the streets of Brooklyn
A noisome odor leers.
Our job now is to reclaim daylight;
Never mind night: that remains
The mystery it will always be.
But in the afternoon on Canal Street,
I tuned in America speaking,
Subdued as never heard before.

Since Time’s murderous birth,
Whose echo we can still make out,
It’s been obvious to a handful
Just what our inheritance is,
And now it’s come to consciousness,
Not like the sun, but like nonsense
Amplified a billion times.
This is the search for keys in a downpour,
Thought hindered by hammering rain,
One more questioning of the earth.

III

A full moon on Halloween.
Won’t be another for 19 years.
But it shows up this year,
A stage-prop seeking a stage.
Yes, there’s some movement
On the streets: little shadows,
Clutching bags, shepherded
As usual by chatting adults
With flashlights, And I hurry
Home through the dark,
As the wind obligingly
Scrapes the street with the dry leaves
It shepherds along,
Then break out the candy,
Pour it in a bowl, and set it
By the door to wait.
8:15. Everyone’s gone now;
My doorbell’s only rung once—
The boy next door: his parents
trust me—so the candy’s poured
Back into the bag, and tomorrow
The crowd at the office
Will dispose of it, I’m sure.
Now, channel-surfing takes me past
The World Series, The Munsters
And chattering of anthrax.
A full moon on Halloween.
Won’t be another for 19 years.

IV

The gyroscope spinning in the radio tried to right itself
As you drove along through traffic this afternoon:
The lead story, when the news came on at two,
Was the government’s done deal with Microsoft.
Ah, for a moment there it was old times again:
Judges sternly judging, lawyers prevaricating, the prating press.
But then the voice moved on to other business:
The FBI picked up some telephone calls,
And the National Guard was patrolling bridges in California.
About that time, the left-turn signal said it was all right to go,
And as you pulled back into the office parking lot,
You remembered a long-ago collision on the Oakland Bay bridge.
The Maverick was totaled; beyond that it was no big deal.

V
The Nostradamus industry
Has set up shop again.
He comes and goes in grocery stores:
You see him now and then.
But now he’s on the world circuit
Where you can’t see his eyes,
And someone’s claiming he foresaw
Fire, raining from the skies.
Fire’s the perfect metaphor
For what we encounter next:
Before someone corroborates
The words of the old text,
Doom brushfires its way around
The corridors of space
As quickly as the Internet
Can make a rumor race.
And by the time that common sense
Finally regains the floor,
Someone claims Old Scratch himself
Appeared amidst the roar.
It’s true that when things fall apart
And the center doesn’t hold,
We often go seek order in
The awesome and the old.
But must we, even though we must
Desperately search for clues,
So lose our heads we start to trust
In the Weekly World News?

VI

One more time,
As so often before,
Autumn can’t seem
To make up its mind.
One morning the glass
Has to be scraped
Before you can move,
Then you find yourself
Impatiently peeling
An unneeded parka
As you step outside.

I once wrote of
Indian summer,
That it seemed as if
Time’s teeth were on edge.
How much truer
Does that seem now.
Less irony around
These days (so they say),
But I’m not so sure.
These Indian summer mornings
Are too much the one
There’s no escaping,
That when the crackle
Of strange blue-sky
Thunder tore a jagged hole
In the face of every clock,
And everything froze
Into frames that burn
With each rewinding,
And don’t fade, but grow
Sharper with recall,
Like the heartbreak
That a lover keeps
Re-playing, and re-playing.

One wishes the fall
Would get on with it,
Turn that last key,
Clear irony from the air,
And bring on the certainties
Of winter, whose shades
Are a more fitting mirror
Of this collective moment.
The poets who love
Autumn leaves, yes,
They’ll be here again,
And we’ll be glad,
But the time isn’t now.
I feel, walking along
In the blue afternoon
With the trees their annual
Shout of orange, yellow
And red, that this isn’t
The time for bright autumn:
The thrush music,
The dusk outside,
Oddly enough,
Are holding us back
From burying our dead.

VII

Architecture is an act of optimism.
--The New York Times

One Sunday evening in Paris June,
Sprawling on a stone bench, half-drunk,
(Beer and jet-lag working in tandem)
I ogled the west font of Notre Dame
And thought...nothing. Sometimes it’s best
Just to take a sublime moment for granted,
And I was too tired to think in any case.
This I once heard said about a great cathedral:
That it was conceived as a smile.
If it faced the sunset, seeking its own end,
Well, that was only part of the scheme of things,
And just one more reason to be glad.
These also were begun and finished
With a smile, though of a different kind:
Not arrogance, no, but a confidence
That was not common in that era.
They arose against a racket so intense
That some wondered if it would ever subside.
But it did, and on we went, safe in the knowledge
Of who our friends and enemies were.
And now Notre Dame and that cloudy sunset
Lie across a space that in all likelihood
Will never again be crossed: the beer-haze
Of that summer night gave way in turn
To the morning no amount of caffeine
Could make sense of, or liquor dull the edge,
And in fact, as I watched the split-screen (live)
The moment the west font awaited came to mind,
And wasn’t quite so easily dismissed
As one might normally have expected.
It was that kind of morning,
As it had been that kind of night.

VIII

In every film
I’ve ever seen
That was worth seeing
More than once,
There comes a defining
Moment: Bogey catches
Bergman’s tear as it falls;
Henry Fonda heaves
The captain’s palm tree
Over the side;
Gable, eyes cocked
Like pistols, freezeframed
Forever, resolutely
Doesn’t give a damn;
Newman and Redford,
Plunging 100 feet
Into swirling water
To the cry of “Ah, shiiiiiiit!”
But the movie moment
That keeps playing back
These dew-wet mornings
Is that flock of pigeons.
Yes, those pigeons,
Those black-and-white
Fail-Safe pigeons,
(Fonda again, ’64)
Fluttering en masse
Into New York
Morning sky,
Like the clattering,
Rippling-down timetables
In the older airports,
Those venetian blinds of
Arrival and departure.
The pigeons
Last a second or two,
And then a fusillade
Of frozen city sights
Leaves you on your own
With the blow-back in the mind
That you know comes next.
Clearer than the implied
Soviet missile following
Is this: in full
Color, (reality doesn’t
Usually bother with
The touch of
Black-and-white)
At 8:44:52, somewhere
In lower Manhattan,
A flock of pigeons
Scrambled for the sky,
And kept on going,
But didn’t fade to black.



IX

An Airbus went down in Rockaway last week.
Horror was called for and duly received,
But also a collective breath-holding:
The stock market nose-dived, and once again
We took up our spots to watch CNN
And wait for the verdict. Hours went by
And as Dominican families wept,
(The doomed jet was Santo Domingo-bound)
A more general dread filled the quiet.
The two flight recorders were quickly found,
And the NTSB sent out the word:
“Mechanical failure most likely cause.”
So. 62 days proved to be too soon.
The Dow-Jones took off, screaming for the moon.



X

The turkey carcass is a skeletal wreck,
(“My fowl was soupbones,” the poet wrote,
Conjuring a nightmare of another sort)
And Macy’s parade having echoed away,
--Uneventful, thank God, as we secretly say—
Cable TV has wasted no time
In trotting out the classics it no doubt hopes
Will put everyone in a shopping mood.
So, as the soap-bubbles tick in the sink,
We settle down, sated, not full, as we say,
And TNT dishes up Home Alone,
The Christmas number about the little boy
Left behind by his family, besieged by burglars,
Who outwits the bad guys and makes them pay.
Outside, traffic is sparse on the road:
A taxi lurches past, and an SUV
Whose blackened windows flash, anonymous
Under the glance of a gas-station awning
As inside, a Pakistani immigrant counts change,
And two kids, one with a ring in his nose,
Skulk to the counter to buy frozen burritos,
Skin slightly green in commercial light.
The turkey is ravaged. It’s Thanksgiving night.
The paper still lies on the lawn from this morning,
An ignored intruder from ordinary time
Bound to re-assert itself come tomorrow.
But for now, plastic-bagged, it patiently waits,
With everything it promises to contain,
For when someone stoops, dew soaking their shoes,
On the way to the car, in a ritual
As automatic, if not quite as dread-free
On this blue-sky morning as it was on that.
Meanwhile, we lean back, not full as we say,
And laugh in a circle one more time
At the little boy, besieged by burglars,
Who outwits the bad guys and makes them pay.




XI

The armchair in the corner keeps its back to the window.
Outside, Indian summer presses on, and on.
Lately, it might have been the storied place
Where one looking quietly toward the tall bookcase
Contemplated those big events that were none of his doing
Or concern; the undusted TV screen,
And the spiderweb up near the ceiling
Were artifacts of an afternoon long and bemused.
The impression still visible could have been any back,
Someone watching, barely moving, outrage beyond thought,
Wondering as the carping and shouting went on
Not so much about them, but of things closer to home,
And then, with a stretch and a yawn perhaps,
A reminder to remember to take a glance
At how the 401(k) might be performing,
And to drop off the car on the way in next morning.
But now the TV screen, dusted off, has hummed to life,
And an old man in a peaked cap is quietly recalling
A horribly unquiet moment, 60 years ago,
When all eyes were suddenly and cruelly forced outward,
And as he’s interviewed, under blue morning sky,
The editing cuts to that all-too-familiar piece of film:
The teetering tower, black smoke, Arizona listing,
Outrage ripping the skin off a long and troubled sleep.
(I had a neighbor who was on one of those ships;
He dove into the harbor, swam as fast as he could,
Eventually came to a sewer pipe, and swam on ahead:
“I wasn’t going to stop until I came to an asshole,” he said.)
The old man in the peaked cap is magnanimous:
“There’s no comparison. It was our job to be in harm’s way.”
This is traditionally the time of year when demons come visit,
And it might be argued once again that our grandparents
Weren’t quite the fools we liked to think they were:
Suddenly, the gathering and the pressure to be “excessive”
Seems to make a kind of sense: weeks ago we were told
Of a sudden surge in “hooking up” and dessert consumption,
And now, huddling again in the early and abrupt dark,
The only thing differentiating this December from last
Is a general nervous pulse-checking, an extra glance
Where one glance would have been plenty before.
The armchair, its back to the window, faces the door.
The spider web near the ceiling has been cleared away.
Someone may have just left, and may be returning soon,
But whoever was here a year ago has left for good.

XII

Jogging under the aegis of a murder of crows,
You recall the courier who survived two plane crashes
Back when we took it for granted that such things were
Accidents. The white envelope atop the dresser
Has been looming there for weeks; louring, one might say,
Like the ceiling, or this December sky.
You know what’s inside, having examined it repeatedly.
Banal as winter daylight, computer-spat, number-riddled,
Perforated along one edge, subject to conditions of contract,
The sort of threat you would never perceive as such
In other times. You who were never superstititous a day
In your life, are now amazed to notice things
You never would have bothered to notice before:
“Baltimore/Washington” is harmless enough a POD,
But did the plane-change have to be “Houston George Bush?”
(And is this the sort of thing, you ask in quiet alarm,
That such as they would notice in plotting their next move?)
The obligatory annual homing forces a crisis:
Will you, when the chips are down, actually find the courage
To go ahead with rituals as you’re being urged to do,
And heed the pressure from your family to fly to the coast,
Just as you did last year without thinking twice?
Out there, the table is set and the kitchen warmly illuminated,
Like the tree that confronts the dining room window,
Smiling at the street, as it has every year since Vietnam.
But you wish, in ordinary time like you never did before,
That the tesseract which you remember from great childhood
Could become real long enough to swoosh you through this.
A dozen time-zones and two satellite-skips away,
They’re clearing out caves, chasing shadows across borders,
While closer to home, the old music makes a game attempt
To play again, and the most risible of the doomsayers
Seem for now to be those discussing WalMart’s bottom line.
Still, you clamp down the hatchback over your carry-on
With a bit more queasiness than when air was more benign.
Even now, the red sign proclaims no satellite parking.
The Gold Lot’s where you go, stacked out in the weeds.
Then the packed bus, lurching every foot or two, inching,
And in the tension that accompanies the tightness
Of clamping your carry-on between your knees,
You want to reach over and smack the old lady, three down
Yammering into a cellular phone for all to hear.
Once you’ve run the bottlenecked gauntlet out of hell,
Bossy six-dollar-an-hour help shouting this way and that,
(“A little authority is a wonderful thing,” grumbles one victim)
You slip into the gateside men’s room for a slug of resolve,
Edgy enough to curse when the stall latch resists closing,
Then, facing the bowl standing up, self-conscious, afraid,
You see where someone’s pencilled a message in the grouting:
“There is life after September 11—move on.”
One more swallow and it’s there: the backbone to face
Jet-blast mobilizing the stroll of the tarmac crows.

XIII

Gathering around and among lights
Scattering, doomed:
What better return of that familiar
Nesting, solsticial light
Could possibly be imagined for now?
But there it is: only days after
We’ve done it all one more time,
The glistening ham taken
Crackling from the oven,
The family showing up
Just late enough to be annoying,
Astaire and Crosby dancing across
The flickering screen in black-and-white,
Bing putting down his pipe to sing
White Christmas, his hands
Fluttering over the keyboard as if
Trying to shake drops of water
From his fingernails,
The menfolk sharing a shot of Glenfiddich
Before the table, (always reminiscent
Of that awful scene in Joyce)
The circling of chairs, then the clearing-away
Of all that multicolored, crinkling
Paper and ribbon, stuffed efficiently
Into a Glad green trash bag
For the intrusion of Wednesday morning,
Comes this. It breaks, at six O’clock,
Upon a string of open-ended triumphs
That may or may not (no one seems sure)
Lead to anything like
An unqualified conclusion,
That the universe may indeed be eternal,
But it’s beginning to look like we’re not.
The number-crunchers, re-writing
The playbook of endgame one more time,
Now say the expansion may
Go on forever, picking up speed,
Not slowing down, (their last good guess)
Until, at some time, ten
To the string-your-zeroes-here moment
From now,
There’ll be nothing but a darkness,
Sublime or not, it makes no difference,
As there will be no eyes, evolved or not
To look upon it and find it sublime.
The object of our mammoth quest
Has skedaddled into the hills;
Reassuring voices say
The future and the answer will be found,
But the heavens as always
Have nothing to add,
As they had nothing to add
All those other times either,
And what kind of maniac
Would be fool enough
To think they had?
This dead-in-four-billion-years
Chunk of ground
My fraying Nikes press against
As I haul the Glad sack down the driveway,
The spiked eggnog still swimming,
Fatty and comforting in my blood,
Is going with its progenitor,
Which just dropped down redly
Behind the eucalyptus trees,
As symmetrical shenanigans
At the galaxy’s core,
Patiently, unhurriedly
And without purpose,
Go about mapping their final score,
A new alphabet
For all the holy books ever written.





XIV

A quarter past nine: the mirror sheen
Shimmers where the candle gutters.
New Year’s Eve, and I settle back
Unpacked, swirl the cubes (they clink)
And as cable TV once again utters
Those commonplaces we hear each year,
I join in progress an old favorite:
Rod Taylor in The Time Machine.

I saw it first when I was a boy:
A Saturday afternoon in ‘62:
Kids crowded into the school
Cafeteria to sit on wooden benches,
And marvel, as daylight poked the corners,
And the old projector rattled, threatening,
At the rickety screen, flanked by the flags
Of states none would ever destroy.

Science fiction with its cautionary eye:
Oh, he learns a lesson all right,
Fast-forwards to high-tech horror,
Then dogs on to another kind,
Careening through a night of night
Toward Weena, and those gargoyles
Gnawing on the bones of the innocent
Who never bothered asking why.

That world, we know, was where they believed.
That’s the joke we’re supposed to get tonight.
Complacent in their overstuffed chairs,
They ask friendly questions of the poor soul;
Of course we feel it’s proper and right
For the smugness to be blown off their clocks.
Okay, he oversteps himself like Phaeton,
But in the end, gets time’s reprieve.

There will be no snowfall tonight.
Winter’s staying away with a will
When it’s most called-for. Socking over
The kitchen tiles to fix another drink,
Rounding out a season well-defiled
And crying to be buried in something,
I finger-spread the slats and look up:
Quietly insolent, Orion’s bright.

Wheels are turning, you’d like to think.
(Or would that really be such a good thing?)
Two years ago, at 1000 mph,
What passed for the millennium came in.
Around that world a knife-edge flew:
Towers exploded and rivers burned,
But the real catastrophe stayed its hand.
No round-number tonight, just this drink.

There are no firecrackers to be heard
As AMC cuts to a commercial break:
Some pitchman or woman for Dell
Around the corner is selling speed.
But it seems we have too much already,
As my cheap Lorus hums the chapters on,
And I, befuddled under Orion’s sword,
Stand swirling cubes, waiting for a word.

2001-2004