The American Century: Literature since 1945 823memos, / plaintive notes,” Nora Gallagher (1959–) declares in “Lament for the
World” (2001), “all life suspended, falling.” Samuel Hazo (1966–), in “September 11,
2001” (2001), remembers actually seeing a few people “freefalling / through the sky
like flotsam from a blaze.” And, in a gesture of even more intense immediacy, Tony
Towle (1939–), in “Diptych” (2002), declares, “I imagine myself in that space / falling
through the exploded event.” Of the “Falling Man” (2001) referred to in the title of
her poem, Diane Seuss (1980–) remarks, “he had no choice, / or two bad choices.
Burn / or fall.” “I didn’t know the man in black pants / who plunged headfirst / from
the top of the north tower,” Lucille Lang Day (1985–) confesses in “Strangers” (2001)
but, nevertheless, he and those who suffered similarly seem her intimates; “I still feel
them / ,” she says, “stirring inside me.” For X. J. Kennedy in “September Twelfth,
2001” (2001) there is a poignant contrast to be drawn between, on the one hand,
“Two caught on film who hurtle / from the eighty-second floor” to their deaths and,
on the other, the poet and his lover, waking to “the incredible joy of coffee / and
the morning light” the day after the disaster. A contrast and a connection – since the
image of a couple who jumped “holding hands” is indelibly engraved on the
memories of those who survive, reminding them of their “pitiful share of time.”
Time assumes different dimensions in other poems that revolve around the trope of
falling. Working from the premise that everyone remembers where they were the
moment when they first heard the news of the 9/11 attack, for instance, some poems
concentrate on that moment. “We watch the Twin Towers of the World Center struck
by our own planes,” Terry Tempest Williams (1955–) recalls in “Scattered Potsherds”
(2001), “then collapse under the weight of terror.” For Hugh Ogden (1937–2007), in
“Northwest Maine, September 2001” (2001), the moment is remembered as a radio
announcement interrupting a performance of a Brahms symphony, signaling “the
end of pure harmonies.” For Lucien Stryk (1924–), in “Quiet, Please” (2001), the
news, he recalls, brought “bedlam in the morning,” causing him to lose his footing
and almost fall himself, down the stairs. Brendan Galvin (1954–), in “Fragments”
(2001), remembers the news as something shouted or rather screamed to him by a
passing cyclist on a road normally “given over to birdsong.” Bruce Bond (1975–), in
“The Altars of September,” approaches the recollected moment indirectly, through
the narrative of a woman who, just before she heard the news, noted “a stillness
unlike any day” and “the uneasy silence of the skies.” And for Rachel Vigier (1979–),
in “Burnt Ground” (2001), what is momentous is “the moment – just before” and
“the moment – just after,” measuring the abyss between the calm of “a bright
September day” and crisis.
What is common to these poems is the feeling of a terrible transfiguration of the
ordinary. “And all this while I have been playing with toys,” Alice Ostriker (1937–)
reflects in “The Window, At the Moment of Flame” (2002). Now, she feels, she has to
put away childish things; the stage sets of the normal and everyday collapse in the
presence of a monstrous fact. And the collapse, it seems, is irreversible. In some
poems, the fact seems not only irreversible but also inescapable, a nightmare played
over and over again. Antler (1946–), in “Skyscraper Apocalypse” (2001), for example,
imagines the film of the towers “being struck, burning, imploding / in slow motionGGray_c05.indd 823ray_c 05 .indd 823 8 8/1/2011 7:31:47 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 47 PM