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.
