The Fall of the Towers

Every Sunday I pull a new tarot,
leave it face up on the alter next to my bed.
That Sunday it was the Tower,
lightning striking its hubris,
people toppling to their deaths.
That Tuesday the towers were gone.

The day was so beautiful,
all Miriam could do was stay in Harlem,
washing dishes with the sunlight
streaming through the windows,
waiting for her lovers to make
their way home through the traffic.
Jenn had been wearing black
for three weeks for her mother,
but now wearing black just wasn't enough.
And at my coffeeshop Awaad looks
very serious, his face intent on the TV.
He says it's hard to fake it these days.
On the wall behind the counter
he's framed a newspaper photo
of Palestinian schoolgirls praying
for Americans, with a flag and a rosary,
where everyone can see them.

That night I dream: I walk toward it,
wind like hot breath on my face,
pushing me back, people running past me
covered in soot, ash, and blood.
They look crazy, dazed,
or they look at me like I'm crazy.
I walk toward it, over ash, escombros,
asbestos, paper everywhere,
metal scraps like broken insect wings,
the charred bodies of sparrows
caught by flames in mid flight.
I look up, the first tower falling in
on itself in that slow motion wave
we watched over and over on TV,
and from the other tower, still smoking,
people opening windows,
in my dream they're little casement windows,
with rusted hand cranks,
first time they've been opened in years,
and like angels fragile bodies extending arms
like wings into the clouds...
and I walk into it.

Now the towers are gone, and where
they were, in my dream,
two deep voids, 110 stories down,
from them emerging ash, paper,
asbestos, birds,
people crawling out from the edges.
I walk into it, down twisted metal stairs
that cling to the walls of the precipice.
There are rooms down there,
looking out across the abyss.

I can see into a room where an old man in a
suit hides under his desk, and i think he
looks like the President,
There are sweatshops down there, factories
where Chinese immigrant women
feverishly sew American flags, and presses
printing thousands of copies of pictures
of burning towers.
There are storehouses with rifles and rocket
launchers, and land mines made in
America.
There is a cave down there where a man in a
green beret hands Bin laden a rifle and
guides the barrel's aim so carefully across
the gap.
There is an artists' studio (the sooted window
next to his desk looking out into the
abyss); he looks like me, and he's making a
drawing of a friendly soldier extending a
hand to an Afghan man, but he's pointing
his gun with the other.

And in the bottom black water like oil slowly
rises...

December, 2001

from Año Cero