The Non-9/11 Post
LET me tell you about a moment I had some ten years ago.
I was working on a poem. I forget which one. It was something I had started writing before I knew what I was really after, which is how most of my favorite bits go. At one point I started to question myself-- what was I doing? Is this what the "market" wants? And then I said to hell with it. Who cares? Not like I was in the Academy or anything. I can write whatever the hell I want.
So I did. And I liked it. And I still do.
I avoided doing a post on September 11th this year out of a feeling that I needn't. A feeling that everybody else would. Alot of folks did, and everything I read was gratifying and appropriate, and a couple of things were illuminating. And I wouldn't begin to take anything away from anything that was posted, and I wouldn't begin to suggest that I had anything better to say. But now I want to do what I felt like doing, what my impulse was last Monday morning, what I didn't do because I didn't know if it was necessary.
This is what I wrote at ten fifteen on the eleventh of September in the year two thousand and one.
WHERE NOTHING EVER HAPPENS
"The nation reeled in horror as the work day began with a series of bombs and crashes that left the World Trade Center in flames and smoke billowing from the Pentagon.
[In Boston]A visitor from Texas wept.
'I can't believe what I'm seeing. I never thought I would see anything like this in my lifetime," said 20-year-old Beverly Evans of Dallas. "How can we stop something like this from happening?'"
Reuters Report, 09/11/2001, 10:35 AM
Thousands of miles away. I am stunned.
I cannot get my mind around the image
off an album cover, out of a comic book, impossible
unthinkable, the twin towers melting down
like Roman candles, melting in the midst of New York
like wax. It strains credulity. In my minds eye I can summon
figures leaping from the tower, but I can't make out anything more
than a sillhouette; like in Hitler's paintings, they have no faces.
What I can make real is the faces of the stunned and wounded
wandering the smoke-dunned streets of Manhattan
trying to punch up numbers on their cell phones
or queing up to get to a pay phone
just to say I'm here; I'm safe.
I can hear sirens, and the murmur of tens of thousands of voices
trying to make things somehow better, less like
this horrible thing has happened. This does not happen;
my mind is fixed on a point of contention:
this does not happen, things like this
do not happen, as I listen to the reports
of emergency personnel rushing to the scene
to somehow stanch the flow of blood
from this gaping wound
in the Isle of Manhattan as I sit at my desk
in Charlotte, North Carolina
thousands of miles away
Where nothing ever happens.
I was working on a poem. I forget which one. It was something I had started writing before I knew what I was really after, which is how most of my favorite bits go. At one point I started to question myself-- what was I doing? Is this what the "market" wants? And then I said to hell with it. Who cares? Not like I was in the Academy or anything. I can write whatever the hell I want.
So I did. And I liked it. And I still do.
I avoided doing a post on September 11th this year out of a feeling that I needn't. A feeling that everybody else would. Alot of folks did, and everything I read was gratifying and appropriate, and a couple of things were illuminating. And I wouldn't begin to take anything away from anything that was posted, and I wouldn't begin to suggest that I had anything better to say. But now I want to do what I felt like doing, what my impulse was last Monday morning, what I didn't do because I didn't know if it was necessary.
This is what I wrote at ten fifteen on the eleventh of September in the year two thousand and one.
WHERE NOTHING EVER HAPPENS
"The nation reeled in horror as the work day began with a series of bombs and crashes that left the World Trade Center in flames and smoke billowing from the Pentagon.
[In Boston]A visitor from Texas wept.
'I can't believe what I'm seeing. I never thought I would see anything like this in my lifetime," said 20-year-old Beverly Evans of Dallas. "How can we stop something like this from happening?'"
Reuters Report, 09/11/2001, 10:35 AM
Thousands of miles away. I am stunned.
I cannot get my mind around the image
off an album cover, out of a comic book, impossible
unthinkable, the twin towers melting down
like Roman candles, melting in the midst of New York
like wax. It strains credulity. In my minds eye I can summon
figures leaping from the tower, but I can't make out anything more
than a sillhouette; like in Hitler's paintings, they have no faces.
What I can make real is the faces of the stunned and wounded
wandering the smoke-dunned streets of Manhattan
trying to punch up numbers on their cell phones
or queing up to get to a pay phone
just to say I'm here; I'm safe.
I can hear sirens, and the murmur of tens of thousands of voices
trying to make things somehow better, less like
this horrible thing has happened. This does not happen;
my mind is fixed on a point of contention:
this does not happen, things like this
do not happen, as I listen to the reports
of emergency personnel rushing to the scene
to somehow stanch the flow of blood
from this gaping wound
in the Isle of Manhattan as I sit at my desk
in Charlotte, North Carolina
thousands of miles away
Where nothing ever happens.
posted by Bobo the Wandering Pallbearer at 6:48 AM
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