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September, 2001
In September, the northeast turns away
From the Pleiades,
That slow disintegration of the heavens
That bombast the late summer sky
Like newsflashes,
Entropy's sideshow that look like grace.
Drawn we are, we do not learn to watch them,
We seem to already know this moment of fleeting wishes,
When future desires are born from our strung in past.
Words rattle across the screen,
Beneath maps, beneath faces, beneath stock footage
Of mujahadeen,
Beneath the stark, twisted cathedral spires of trade,
The construction worker who tells again and again,
How the cloud emerged from implosion
And hovered almost gracefully as the ash turned red.
Smoke in a column, then not in a column.
Bidart tells me that Tacitus writes
Of the column sent by Germanicus
Who discovered amid the plunder and the dead,
The Eagle of the nineteenth legion
Lost with Varus and fifteen thousand unburied men.
In revenge,
They laid waste the Bructeri in the Teutoburgian wood.
And Germanicus turned the first earth
At the burial mound in Rome.
Suetonius adds that he later died in Syria,
Poisoned by his father,
Who feared his aspirations to the throne.
How shall we learn to aspire?
Our hands reaching.
How shall we learn that mourning is not learned?
That already we know absence
Divided as we are from grace
That diamond in the forehead,
That river in the heart,
That pencil that does not erase.
And these are our drums and these are our veils,
These our fires burning long into the night
Find the book in the rubble,
Find the chalice of grace,
Find the gift you have yet to name
And fill it.
Find.
Praise.
Praise.
©2001, John Mulrooney
John Mulrooney threw his back out and is looking for a good place to go swimming. This poem first appeared in Anastasios Kozaitis' email Poem of the Day & in can we have our ball back?, issue 8.1. Another of his poems is in issue 2.0.
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