Tuesday
By Cameron Dezen Hammon Posted in Humanity on September 9, 2011 0 Comments 3 min read
The Slow Art of Tea Previous Ground Zero & the American Dream Next

For Matthew Yarnell

 

1.

How appropriate, those two “ones” in eleven

standing side by side, the left only slightly longer. Like a left leg is slightly longer.

Or two haystacks standing side by side

one burning more quickly and thoroughly, the one that got the first match.

 

Korean grandmother beside me on the R train

Nose deep in her paper and sticky bun

feels the meteoric fireball warm her plastic window.

She glances up then turns back to Page Six.

 

I mumbled under my breath

I trust you with my life as I walked to 25th street station.

Steps from Greenwood Cemetery the almost ghosts of firemen screamed

up the Avenue, disturbing my reverie. I thought of the firemen I pulled groggy

from their beds to rescue a brood of half dead kittens pinned beneath scaffolding.

 

Later, drunk on gin and tonics I saw the image of the Virgin in soot;

human flesh and fax cover sheets carried on the breeze

to my brother’s front yard in Brooklyn. Financial Projections, Interoffice Memoranda,

singed at the edges, but otherwise perfect, unharmed.

 

2.

1986 Honda Civic, light blue, with Terrapin Station bumper sticker parked

under gathering trees. Pot & patchouli, Tijuana blankets in the backseat; forbidden

from riding in it I headed home. The next morning

it was wrapped around a telephone pole.

Then that next summer there was another car, a truck,

I traced its oil rainbows with my toe in a puddle outside Pasquale’s Pizza.

This time it was a boy I liked. Streets lubricated with summer rain, an unseen ditch, and ditchweed. Two teenaged

drivers lit like Roman candles on Christmas.

 

Only it wasn’t Christmas or even night.

It was Tuesday; clear and blue and beautiful.

You were fast asleep in the back seat of Kate’s dad’s

brand-new Passat as black ice pounded us for 6 hours on the New Jersey Turnpike

and a blazing, neon cross sneered from the grill of an 18- wheeler riding our tail.

 

I chewed my mouth to ribbons, a pocket-sized bird thrashed in my chest.

I recited the Lord’s Prayer (I made it up, I didn’t know the Lord’s Prayer),

and smoked. You slept, then the rain finally stopped.

 

The highway was about to end at Pittsburgh

When ice, or was it glass, shot out in a perfect arc, mid-air

It was the impact of a crash 30 feet in front of us.

Just keep driving baby, I said, just keep driving,

and we did, and the glass fell softly all around us.

But you knew nothing about this

You were asleep in the backseat and why would I tell you?

Should I have?

 

 

3.

Then so many year later, all that glass and fire and metal;

I saw the smoking carcass

(My brother and I’d walked 14 blocks with a wine buzz)

but I didn’t think of you immediately.

Or for days, even. I called your voice mail.

 

Then I remembered the view from your office

and how there aren’t any other buildings

with 103 floors. There aren’t any other buildings like that one,

from where standing and looking just right you can see

all the way back to your parents house in Jersey.

You can see all the way back to tiny cars and trains,

snaking one by one over the river and through the tunnel,

taking us, innocent as doves,

from one place to the next. From this life, to the next.

 

 

9/11 poetry


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