'Elegy for September 10' (8 Years Later)

Elegy for September 10

Before all of our totems fell, you drew

A talisman on my forehead. I prayed

For a late harvest and rose like a

Steel-eyed crow, scouring

As many grains as I could devour before the last

Burnt vestiges of summer sloughed from my skin;

Before the light touch of early wind could suggest

Our search for conclusions was at an end. That last New

York night, we sat in Astoria. Hope sparked. I took in

The darkening skyline, struggled against sleep, dared

Dream of a future again. Had I been a better alchemist

I would not have nursed this, would have slipped away

From the past to blend memories like a salve,

Muddling with the practiced ease of one who works to forget

Everything, even instinct. Flying out of Manhattan that morning,

I left behind something more beautiful than any scar

I’d ever unpeeled. It was as promising

A morning since our demise was first revealed.

I wrote about this poem back in June, as I was posting daily thoughts about individual poems I'd written. It's hard to believe it was eight years ago. Here's what I wrote about the poem:

I actually flew out of New York City on September 10, 2001. Summer broke that weekend along the East Coast, and the skies were crisp and clear and cool. I had been in the city on and off for a year, working on a very broken marriage and filled with the belief that fixing it was just the thing you did. When I left early that Monday morning, it was with a sense of possibility and tentative plans to quit my life in Richmond and relocate.

The poem started with fragments, dredged from somewhere deep within. The first four lines emerged almost unscathed through weeks and weeks of revision, as I polished the poem down to as raw and lean a state as its language demanded. What emerged was a piece of writing that distinctly captures the hope, the pain, the longing -- for closure and for implosion -- and the hint of something truly terrible in the air.

That, of course, came a day later when New York fell in on itself and my marriage fully unraveled.

Comments

[Maggi]

How prescient, John! This is not my first reading of this poem; I am moved by it each time. As a side note, I flew home from Atlanta on 9/10/01, there for a wedding but also a "blind date with 10 people" where I met other waiting adoptive parents, three of whom traveled with me to bring C and her "Zhuzhou sisters" home nine months later.

[Chris]

This is amazing, John. Amazing. Is there a way in Garden of Words to do a search for all your poems there?