SEPTEMBER 11, 2001

(For Rachel, who dreams in Brooklyn)

 

 

 

            By the park, my daughter dreams

            of young firemen who helped her home

                        with bags and babies – dead

                        beneath the tower.  One said,

            “What’s this we hear?  You’re leaving us?

                        Rachel, we’d never flee

this home of ours, no matter what it meant

                        to live and die like me:”

            by tower, park, and spangled sea.

 

            Her train of the fretful living slips

            quick-quick through the empty station

                        lighted like a stage

                        and mobbed with ghosts who played

            their time, now mount to a phantom tower.

                        If well connected, we

may raise these dead, as every generation

                        turns salvation’s key:

            by tower, park, and spangled sea.

 

            Life or death means parting from

            the darling hopes and loves we lose;

                        the sense of loss seeps in

                        throughout, like sense of sin.

            “I take my place among my City’s

                        types, from body free,”

the legless beggar sang, propped up against

                        a golden Trumpery:

            by tower, park, and spangled sea.

 

Because the name of life is Change,

            all are dying as they live.

                        We part in pain from love,

                        with care from work we have,

            from work and love we never had,

                        to come or still undreamed.

Things will or won’t outlast each living soul;

            what will is how things seemed:

            the tower, the park, and the spangled sea.

 

Misfit moderns strut their stuff

in carefully preserved quaint towns;

            but part of this City’s maze

                        dies each day, replaced

            anew in other forms, the more

                        rebuilt the same if we –

beggar, fireman, scholar, fashion-plate –

                        with single eye may see:

            the tower, the park, and the spangled sea.

 

            Love is a rule that places us

            where we belong in time.  The plant

                        on our tenement window sill,

                        how a sea breeze fills

            a curtain, that rock in the park where you read

                        and dream and the tower seem

perfected; love would have synchronal things

                        in timeless time agree:

            the tower, the park, and the spangled sea.

 

            Its spirit survives this City’s parts,

            how these things mattered reborn in its people:

                        eyes taking pictures of old

                        between the body and soul.

            Augustine thought death was born of sin,

                        wrote, “Love means I want you to be,”

a way of seeing and so a way of being,

            root and branch of the one tree:

            the tower, the park, and the spangled sea.