824 The American Century: Literature since 1945over and over,” the lovers jumping holding hands as a “freeze-frame.” Similarly,
Wayne Dodd (1945–), in “The Third Tower” (2001), thinks of the towers “falling
forever / out of the future” and “Falling into memory / into absence”; Dan Giancola
(1960–) tells us, in “The Ruin” (2001), that he is “glued to the tube” as “Flight / 175
repeatedly slams / its innocent freight / into Tower Two” on his television screen;
while Judith Minty (1950–), in “Loving This Earth” (2001), imagines the remorseless
repetitive process of destruction in terms of “the tower falling into itself over and
over.” Time stands still in these poems; in others, time moves inexorably from
“before” to “after”; in some, towers and people fall and are gone; in others, both
seem to go on falling forever. In all these poems, however, there is the shared feeling
that, as Dodd puts it and repeats it in “The Third Tower,” “nothing will ever be the
same / again” – or, as Karl Kirchwey (1956–) confesses in “Nocturne, Morningside
Heights” (2001), “It is too early and too late.” The fall is a shared fall into darkness.
Adding to this feeling of inexorable fall is the suspicion voiced in many of these
poems that terror and counterterror are mirror images of each other. “A bomb
made / from a jetliner hits the World Trade Center,” observes Daniel Bourne (1955–)
in “The First of October, We” (2001). “A jetplane flings / a bomb on the Taliban in
Kandahar.” “These / are the transformations of the world, / one thing leading to
another.” “So kindred slaughter each other,” comments F. D. Reeve (1928–) in
“Sunset, New York Harbor” (2001): a sentiment that Ishmael Reed, in “America
United” (2001), develops into a wholesale diatribe against any “crusade” “to hammer
the infidels” in revenge for 9/11, suggesting that the counterterrorist is a “comrade in
oil” of the terrorist. In “Letter to Hayden Carruth” (2003), Marilyn Hacker (1942–)
suggests that fundamentalism rather than oil is the link between enemies:
“men maddened with revealed religion,” she insists, are behind the conflict on both
sides. More simply, but echoing that sentiment, Eliot Katz (1969–), in “When the
Skyline Crumbles” (2002), suggests that “the war has now come home.” Ursula Le
Guin, in “American Wars” (2002), goes further, slipping the reader the suggestion
that all American history is war; while Diane Di Prima presents the entire world as
an elaborate network of violence in which everyone is complicit. “Do not think to
correct this by refusing to read,” she warns, then later, “Do not think to correct this
by reading.” “It is happening even as you read this page,” Di Prima declares. “By the
time you finish reading this it will be over.” Knowledge, in this context, is
powerlessness. The poet can only rage impotently against the dying of the light, as
“halfway around the world the bombs are dropping.” In “The Blinding of Samson”
(2002) Robert Bly uses the biblical story invoked in the title to underline his growing
sense of the powerlessness he feels. “Please god help / The human beings,” the poem
concludes, “for men are coming to blind Samson.” Those men, it seems, are in
control of events and obeying the logic of war. “Things go on,” Bly reflects in
“The Approaching War” (2003). “The weight of history begins / To bend us over
once more.” All the poet can do, evidently, or feels he can, is to watch and wearily
lament the apparent failure to remember that violence only generates further
violence. “The writer of this poem,” Bly confides, “is forgetful like you”; and, to that
extent, we are all responsible for what is happening.GGray_c05.indd 824ray_c 05 .indd 824 8 8/1/2011 7:31:47 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 47 PM