Don’t Tell Me Brother (Years of September fallout are still ahead.)

When I heard the low roar and looked above my head
to see the shadow of what, maybe the Angel of Revelation,
fall across Richmond Terrace
I thought, "Now, there's an image."

When I saw the slow, soft—like he was just pulling into a
space on the fifth floor of a parking garage—landing
I thought, "This is a dream."

When I looked across at the New Jerusalem and saw
with my eyes the burning, burning,
like some ancient funerary rite for a Titan,
a burning finger of a strange god,
I thought nothing.

When I heard the screams, "It's going! It's going!"
and "Look! Look! Look!" and I saw the cloud
mushroom, not up, but down and out toward
the Battery prowling lower Manhattan,
and I couldn't see Manhattan at all,

I thought I heard Walt Whitman
singing barbarically from the clouds,
subsuming molecules of concrete,
asbestos, steel, and people.

And I didn't believe what I had just seen.
And I thought that Manhattan was gone—
traded away in a game of divine retribution
of more than Biblical proportions,
and the Angel of Revelation, his feet on fire,
sailed above, or so now I thought.

Then it was done.
Then there were funerals to attend.
Then there were helicopters buzzing
for days for days like monstrous insects.

Then there was the sweat, and the shaking
and the nightmare of the dark corner
and the crawling into the dark corner
for months for months for months.

For months the sky was cat's-eye-marble blue
like this whole city was being taunted
like every person in this whole city
had this same blue sky stamped on their retinas,
so that they would never, never be able to forget
every time they saw that same deep blue sky:

"Oh, a September 11th day," they’d think, emerging
from their houses or apartments on every golden blue-skied
September morning (even years and years later, even now)
“Just for you, New York,” or so I thought I heard 45
the Angel of Revelation laugh.

On then to the psychiatric hospital
where the boy who was Muslim wore rosary beads
around his neck for protection and drank from the toilet

where the recidivist junkie, granola bars, toothpaste, matches,
hidden in his drawer, conned a pack of 100's for the extra drag
during the fifteen-minute cigarette-courtyard shuffle

where two women, sweat-suited without strings,
spoke in low tones and drank
furtive orange juice from the community refrigerator

where the zealot lawyer, ashen, swayed
like the Tower of Babel before its collapse

where I, head down pounding the conference table,
bellowed and sobbed, "I know what this is; I know what this is!"
where I finally had the revelation:
where I picked up my head and looked into the doctor's
ignorant face and snarled, "This is grief. This is grief."
in a voice that was triumphantly distemperate,
so she backed away to call security
but was thwarted by a psychiatric angel.

Now tell me, as the bombs
still rock rock rock the cradle of civilization.
Now tell me as I hear the babble of war-front news.

Now tell me to write a political poem.
Now tell me to write a political poem.

And I'll tell you, brother, that I must block my ears
and disable my inner night vision,
and I'll tell you that orange is the color of rapture
on the fourth-floor psych ward.

And I'll tell you now that I will not,
in order to write your political poem,
crawl, eyes afire, teeth clenched,
back into that dark corner,
then stealthily into oblivion.