822 The American Century: Literature since 1945Spires suggests in “The Beautiful Day.” “We peer beyond the ruin of that day / and
see ... what do we see?” The answer maps the geography of absence: “Just smoke
and rubble / A vacancy terrible to behold.”
The sense of apocalypse hovering just below the surface of commemorative pieces
like “Ground Zero” and “The Beautiful Day” is openly acknowledged in some other
post-9/11 poems. “Thunder and lightning and our world / is another place,” observes
Lucille Clifton in “Tuesday 9/11/01 (2001), “no day / will ever be the same no blood
untouched.” “Everything is burning – everything –,” David Ray (1932–) announces
in “Preparing the Monument” (2001): a bleak thought on which Aaron Smith
(1980–) and Jean Valentine offer their own variations. So Smith confesses, in “Silent
Room” (2002), that there is not enough to convince him after 9/11 that “everything
I am isn’t burning,” while Valentine admits that she can see “nothing” anywhere “In
the Burning Air” (2001) that appears to surround her. “Black leaves,” in turn, and
“the limbs of the city / Warping towards heaven,” the burning of the natural and the
built environment, characterizes the landscape of destruction mapped by David
St. John (1949–) in The Face (2001); while in “Late Blooming Roses” (2001), David
Baker (1960–) describes the week after September 11 as a week of “black clouds,
rain, spit- / mist of fog, / the streets / gripped with terror,” and in “The Equation”
(2001) Steve Kowit (1938–) sketches an almost Gothic portrait of “Horrific towers
of smoke,” “belching flames,” and a “haze of rubble.” In “No” (2002) Joy Harjo
stresses the community of suffering, the shared grief of all those caught up in the
war between terrorist and counterterrorist: a theme that Maxine Hong Kingston
also explores in “Memorial Service” (2001), where she suggests that, because of the
multicultural character of America, “all our wars are civil wars.” And Harjo’s poem
situates that community in a scarred landscape that “all those who had no quarrel
with each other” now inhabit, a landscape overshadowed by “the terrible black
clouds” of conflict. There is a surreal dimension to the portrait of apocalypse Harjo
paints; and that surrealism is even more marked in “Gulf War” (2002) by Carolyn
Kizer and “Green Plants and Bamboo Flute” (2003) by Brenda Hillman (1951–).
Kizer borrows, in fact, from Verlaine, whom she quotes in her epigraph and then
translates in the first line: “The whole green sky is dying. The last tree flares.” This is
a poem written, apparently, at the end of the world, “under a canopy of poisonous
airs,” its elegantly rhyming lines only serving to emphasize the man-made chaos it
portrays. With “Green Plants and Bamboo Flute” confusion is even worse
confounded. “Oaks tear up the storm floor, / ” the poem begins, “Nothing left to
warn / The poisoned rat has poisoned the owl.” A series of surreal images function
here as a precise register of the sense that, under the pressure of war, everything is
running down, descending from crisis to extinction. Or, as Anna Rabinowitz (1977–)
has it in “Bricolage: Versicolor” (2002) – which offers a kind of poetic abc of
confusion – from “All afternoon alterities advanced” to “ZER0, O ZERO, OUR
ZEALOTSTREWN ZONES.”
What is remarkable about many post-9/11 poems, in fact, is the sheer range and
scope of their imagination of disaster. The trope of falling is, unsurprisingly, a com-
mon one: falling towers and falling men and women. “Our towers fall into / a dust ofGGray_c05.indd 822ray_c 05 .indd 822 8 8/1/2011 7:31:47 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 47 PM