SOME DAYS I want to call them up
on numbers that ring to nowhere
and ask where they are, what wisdom
they can offer in the days after their offices
came crumbling down with them inside.
I want to send notes demanding answers
to fax machines that are now part
of the cold Manhattan earth.
Does the plastic casing of consumer electronics
follow the eternal rules of ashes to ashes,
dust to dust?
Some days I want to walk
among the dead for a moment,
to see the untouched apartments,
undone dishes and unmade beds
that dot the city and suburbs in inertial memoriam,
frozen moments of finality hiding amid
the relentless trajectory of daily life.
“The dent from his head
is still there on the pillow,”
Welles Crowther’s friend marvels,
as if somehow that prosaic impression
from a final night’s sleep
contained part of a man’s soul.
Some mornings, a world away, my lungs hunger
to inhale the air that so many thousands
tried for days to expel. Would I feel
the tiny particles of steel and concrete
and jumbo jet and receptionist’s desk
and him and her four thousand times
as they are rendered part of me?
But the Hudson River winds have blown away
those artifacts, and December has come.
WHAT IS IT about humans
that we want to collect
the unfinished moments of strangers
and turn them over and over in our pockets,
eroding them into smoothness
like worn shells gathered from last year’s seashore vacation?
Are we being intrusive to crave knowledge
of those we didn’t know? Is it their lives,
or their deaths, that compel us
into making “Amazing Grace” cliché
and the tears on a pregnant wife’s televised cheek
a community’s property?
I lost no one, yet I nurse phantom pain
from severed limbs I never had,
mourn people I never met
and watch others do the same.
Now, slashed and scarring over,
I am a helpless spectator
as my people chart a future
on notions of fear and disorientation
with little hint of what new tragedies
might be planted by scattering impulsive seeds
during this desolate winter.
–Beijing, 12-18-2001