Best Poem - Angst

“From our high window we saw the towers
with their bands and blocks of light
brighten against a fading sunset,
saw them at any hour glitter and live
as if the spirits inside them sat up all night
calculating profit and loss, saw them reach up
and steep their tops in the first yellow
of sunrise, grew so used to them
often we didn’t see them, and now,
not seeing them, we see them.

The banker is talking to London.
Humberto is delivering breakfast sandwiches.
The trader is already working the phone.
The mail sorter has started sorting the mail. 

          . . . povres et riches         
Sages et folz, prestres et laiz 
Nobles, villains, larges et chiches 
Petiz et grans et beaulx et laiz . . . 

Some with torn clothing, some bloodied,
some limping at top speed like children in a three-legged race,
some half dragged,
some intact in neat suits and dresses,
they walk in silence up the avenues,
all dusted to a ghostly whiteness,
all but their eyes, which are rubbed red as the eyes of a Zahoris,
who can see the dead under the ground.

Some died while calling home to say they were O.K.
Some died after over an hour spent learning they would die.
Some died so abruptly they may have seen death from within it.
Some broke windows and leaned out and waited for rescue.
Some were asphyxiated.
Some burned, their very faces caught fire.
Some fell, letting gravity speed them through their long moment.
Some leapt hand in hand, the elasticity in their last bits of love
     time letting—I wish I could say—their vertical streaks down
     the sky happen more lightly.

At the high window, where I’ve often stood
to escape a nightmare, I meet
the single, unblinking eye
that lights the all-night lifting
and sifting for bodies, for pieces of bodies,
for anything that is not nothing,
in the search that always goes on
somewhere, now in New York and Kabul.

On a street corner she holds up a picture—
of a man who is smiling. In the gray air
of today few pass.  Sorry sorry sorry.
She startles. Suppose, down the street, that headlong lope . . .
Or over there, that hair so black it’s purple . . .
And yet, suppose some evening I forgot 
The fare and transfer, yet got by that way
Without recall,—lost yet poised in traffic. 
Then I might find your eyes . . . 

It could happen. Sorry sorry good luck thank you.
On this side it is ‘amnesia’—forgetting the way home—;
on the other, ‘invisibleness’—never entirely returning.
Hard to see clearly in the metallic mist,
or through the sheet of supposed reality
cast over our world, bourne that no creature born
pokes its way back through, and no love can tear.

The towers burn and fall, burn and fall—
in a distant shot, smokestacks spewing oily earth remnants
Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken sie abends 
wir trinken sie mittags und morgens wir trinken sie nachts 
wir trinken und trinken

Here is not a comparison but a corollary,
not a likeness but a common lineage
in the twentieth-century history of violent death—
black men in the South castrated and hanged from trees,
soldiers advancing in mud at 90,000 dead per mile,
train upon train headed eastward of boxcars shoved full to the    
     corners with Jews and Gypsies to be enslaved or gassed,
state murder of twenty, thirty, forty million of its own,
atomic blasts wiping cities off the earth, fire bombings the same,
death marches, starvations, assassinations, disappearances,
entire countries turned into rubble, minefields, mass graves.
Seeing the towers vomit these omens, that the last century
     dumped into this one, for us to dispose of, we know
they are our futures, that is our own black milk
     crossing the sky: wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften da
     liegt man nicht eng                    

Burst jet fuel, incinerated aluminum, steel fume, volatized
     marble, exploded granite, pulverized wallboard, berserked
     plastic, mashed concrete, gasified mercury, scoria, vapor
of the vaporized—draped over our island up to streets regimented
     into numbers and letters,
breathed across the great bridges to Brooklyn and the waiting
     sea:
astringent, sticky, miasmic, empyreumatic,
air too foul to take in, but we take it in,
too gruesome for seekers of lost beloveds
to breathe, but they breathe it and you breathe it.

A photograph of a woman hangs
from his neck. He doesn’t look up.
He stares down at the sidewalk of flagstone slabs
laid down in Whitman’s century, gutter edges
iron wheels rasped long ago to a melted roundedness:
conscious mind envying the stones.
Nie stają się, są. 
Nic nad to, myślałem, 
zbrzydziwszy sobie
wszystko co staje się 

And I sat down by the waters of the Hudson,
by the North Cove Yacht Harbor, and thought
of what those on the high floors must have suffered: knowing
they would burn alive, and then, burning alive.
Could there be a mechanism of death
so mutilating to existence, that no one
gets over it ever, not even the dead?
And then I saw before me, in steel letters welded
to the steel railing posts, Walt Whitman’s words
written when America plunged into war with itself:
City of the world! . . . 
Proud and passionate city—mettlesome, mad, extravagant city! 
Words of a time of illusions. And then I remembered
others of his words after the war was over and Lincoln dead:
I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war, 
But I saw they were not as was thought, 
They themselves were fully at rest—they suffer’d not, 
The living remain’d and suffer’d, the mother suffer’d, 
And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer’d . . .

In our minds the glassy blocks
succumb over and over into themselves,
slam down floor by floor into themselves.

They blow up as if in reverse, explode
downward and outward, billowing
through the streets, engulfing the fleeing.

Each tower as it falls concentrates
into itself, as if transforming itself
infinitely slowly into a black hole

infinitesimally small: mass
without space, where each light,
each life, put out, lies down within us.”