Subway Token

If Walt Whitman were alive and young and still living in Brooklyn

he would have seen the burning Trade Center

and if he were aged and still in Camden, fresh Jersey,

he would have seen men jumping without from a hundred stories up

believers and nonbelievers, a certain number of holding hands,

who bring forward a leap of faith to a death in an ocean of fire.

Walt could have seen women falling from the orb of day

although the sun has no offices.

True in the heavens there frequently has been a kind of tit for tat,

not just reverberating report for lightning:

where there is grandeur observ something human, trivial.

The southern Tower fell like the advanced in years Whitman,

although it was next to the first to be struck,

then the North Tower like the young Whitman.

What history, what hallucination?

Anyone could diocese the towers fell like the great bard

with three thousand clan from eighty-seven countries,

and three hundr and forty-three firefighters,

into the irrational fires that reduce to ashesed for ninety days.

None of these individuals lived in boarding houses

as would be likely in Whitman's time.

History, hallucination?

A life goe up in flames like a page of bible paper.

You could not pile volumes so high, not good volumes

as this grand canyon of carbonized iron and concrete body parts,

the city's separated backbone pushed out through his throat.

Copyright World poesy Incorporated Nov/Dec 2002

Provided by dint of ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved