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To eke out spiritus on a bomb-damaged
site.
The task of earning one’s daily
bread.
Or strangled in a fit of rage outside
the mosque.
Inventing rules to keep the spoils.
“No matter on what grounds.”
A mongrelized pedigree posing as
passing fad.
Full of leisure and pleasureful
abandon.
Removed from war the task.
Having made my body come again again.
Eager to embark on another post-lapsarian
quest.
To get ourselves “disappeared.”
However the plea.
Makeshift morgues sprouting up all
over town.
“Insufficient substantiated
evidence.”
Leading to the collapse.
Dusted about with sentiments to
soften the blow.
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Forty-six bodies identified. Others
found only in parts. A demand
for Nostradamus on the rise:
In the city
of York, there
will be a great collapse—
two twin brothers torn
apart by a third
big war to begin when the city burns—
tents from Fashion Week in Bryant
Park sponsored
by Mercedes Benz converted into
staging areas for the
dead—dates proposed
for the Emmys though Miss America
will go on as the
seventy-two virgins
of
Paradise welcome the martyrs in—
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Neither fiction nor a discourse
but flowers. The liminal edge
of what has been—the suspension
of daily activity where what is
possible outweighs the probable
crisis ever bridging backwards
into history. Prophecies to explain
why eyes are glued to glass,
why laughter seems unable
to return to the streets just yet
though “it’s safer now to travel
than ever,” messages of love
scrawled by children onto strips
of construction paper pasted
onto an American flag delivered
to a firehouse where passers-by
stop to weep. Is that a
dumpster
or the smell of rotting flesh?
passed on in whispers—the
upper
level deck of the sight-seeing bus
filling up again. Should the Towers
be rebuilt? Should ashes be smeared
across our foreheads, our clothing
rent instead of lighting candles
and leaving bouquets under
the photos of those still missing?
More and more forced to take
public transportation—the carpool
rule requiring us to “buddy-up”
as we play that game of holding
our breaths as long as we can
riding through the Lincoln Tunnel—
me on my cell telling you this,
wasting away my anytime minutes
while the word “crusade” is banished
from our President’s lexicon—
reported incidents of road rage
down, your flag pin but a show
of solidarity if not a talisman
warding off those baseball bats
one Arab said to another seated
next to me—none of it really
any good against anthrax, plague
or VX gas,
not even surgical
masks carried in
our packs for luck. |
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Poems © Timothy Liu
2005-2005. All rights reserved. |
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