Nine Eleven

Divine Capacity

The struggle of a man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. – Milan Kundera

Forgetting: that is divine capacity. –Friedrich Nietzsche


Transfixed in front of Lively's
computer monitor, a mere three of
millions in the same boat, we listen
to streaming broadcasts from CNN.
The coffee pot overflows
but no one notices
until an acrid smell
rouses us from our posts. Everything’s burning.
There’s talk of leaving,
the inability to concentrate.
We stay.

Shannon's husband
has business near the Pentagon.
She falls apart when he calls,
saying he's stranded
in his car but otherwise safe.
It's noon on the east coast.
Clock hands turn to heaven.
Laura says Did you see the cloud of smoke
from the original explosion?
It was the face of Satan, I swear.

Horrific images stick to the brain
like post-it notes cemented to the cerebrum
traveling between hemispheres
on an overwhelmed tract. The gyri
and the sulcus fold in and up and down,
gray hills heading for the deep grove.
Signals. The images are blurry,
take hours to load.

Forget instructive reminders of meetings
to attend or conference calls or lists
of items to be picked up at the grocery.
Forget before. Horror relayed
through the brain stem:
planes crashing into buildings,
buildings burning and falling,
men and women tearing up Nassau Street,
suit jackets half-off, empty arms
flailing behind them. Firemen
and emergency rescue workers
scaling tangled mountains of steel,
concrete and glass. Cheeks raw
from wiping tears, stoic sons and fathers
crumbling under the weight of waiting,
mothers and aunts interviewed
on various news shows
describing what kind of person
Joe or Ann was, is,
will always be.

And then it rains. The images smear,
corners pull up, the notes curl. Outfitted
with a mechanism to go on, to forget,
the mind lessens the initial wince:
hours in labor, a back in spasm, watching
a jet careen into a 110-story monument
to money and power. Watch the same scene
over and over. Tell the same stories, different
every time. A phone rings with irrevocability.
The rain falls harder. Trip and fall
then look back again, see people
scrambling like quanta on the lip
of a concrete universe, hear the rumble
and roar of landmarks giving way.
Twist the lens to lose focus,
turn off radios and televisions and pull
the curtains. There’s hope in shadow,
shamed by this demon of insignificance
come knocking on blame.

Just before midnight, Lively calls,
says he can’t sleep, how about meeting
at a bar downtown,
how about settling
for what comes easy—
rocks in the glass,
a cork leaving the bottle,
another long, grateful pour
and the burn before the buzz.
Without hesitation, we’re out
and into the deluge,
we wade the numbing mud.