Unit of Measure

Sept 8 2011

You’d think 10 years

would be just about enough.

A nice round number,

the counter re-setting to one.

As if starting over

was somehow possible. 

This is, after all, how we measure out our lives

however unevenly.

The decade of your teens

filled with slow desire,

and then your 40s, flying by.

As each milestone year

gets less and less consequential.

So a decade after the big event

that changed everything,

that made odd expressions

like “the new normal”

make a kind of sense,

you’d have at least expected

some comprehension

numb acceptance

or even dull forgetting,

however tenuous.

Not closure, of course.

That presumes things end,

doors close

irrevocably

behind us.

Because what happened is done

but never over.

And it’s true what they say,

you can’t go home again.

So you go on

carrying what you left with,

all you ever needed

to feel anchored, grounded

a sense of place

  —  safe, in your inner harbour.

But baggage accumulates,

and like dead weight, a ball-and-chain

pulls you down.

Relationships change, love alters.

The earth shrugs,

and solid ground

will never feel the same.

But not how towers collapse  —

in an instant

before our eyes

leaving gaping holes in the sky.

All over the world

hospitals were full

of dying people

that very day,

the high drama

of little lives.

Some expected,

others, a call in the night.

But these were not monumental,

and our attention

was somewhere else.

And then, when the dust finally settled

we carried on.

Except 10 years later

the body count hasn’t stopped.

A state of war, that’s constant

a culture of fear.

And 1st responders

who still thanklessly fall.

And a hole in the sky

defying us

to build stronger

                              …finer

                                        …high.

I don’t think I’ve ever written a 9/11 poem. Which may seem odd, since I began writing poetry in Oct 2001. As it is, pure coincidence. There were other reasons I turned to poetry. And other than that, politics is one of 3 things I’ve tried to resist in my writing; the others being confession, and personal therapy. I have too much concern for the reader’s patience to indulge in any one of those!

The opening question – how much distance do we need to fully understand something – reminds me of Chou en Lai’s (the premier of China at the time of Nixon’s landmark visit) famously amusing quote. He was asked his opinion of the French revolution. His response, succinctly and inscrutably Chinese, with all the world-weary patience and historical perspective that implies, went something like “Too early to tell.”

But we humans have this penchant for decades: for the round number, for big commemorative events. There is nothing intrinsically significant about 10 years; but, like football fields and Volkswagens, it seems to be an awfully convenient unit of measure. So that’s where I got my initial traction in this poem; and it went from there. Which means that the poem is as much about the idea of a decade later as it is about 9/11 itself.

I touch on many things, but briefly. I’ll trust the reader to take it from there. Although the idea in the 3rd last stanza has interested me ever since I heard Joan Didion interviewed about her beautifully written book The Year of Magical Thinking, about her husband’s untimely death.  He died unexpectedly in New York City on Sept 11 2001. It struck me that the monumental events of 9/11 somehow diminished all the other deaths that must have occurred on that same fateful day; and by diminishing their deaths somehow invalidated their lives. Which in turn touches on the idea of US exceptionalism:  all over the world, people have been dying daily in horrible wars and terrorist incidents; and yet Americans was so utterly shocked to learn that they (we?) are not immune, inviolable, exempt.  At the time it was – and still is – rather subversive to suggest that the horrible destruction of the twin towers should be set among all these incidents, rather than being set apart as something particularly horrifying and unacceptable. I didn’t say any of this in the poem, of course:  that would be far too political for my taste. So I kept things typically small and personal. (Actually, I think that 9/11 does stand out as perhaps the most egregious:  not only the fact that it still stands as the most deadly terrorist attack ever, not only its undeniable symbolic weight, but also the way it does seem to have changed everything. Of course, as I said in the beginning, it seems awfully presumptuous to declare such a thing a short 10 years on.)

The new tower that replaces the World Trade Centre will, in fact, be higher:  1776 feet, to be exact. No matter what you think of American politics and American culture, you can’t help but admire their irrepressible patriotism!