Chorus and Anti-Chorus
As to Why We Will Not Stop (Making the Hats)
She Drives
(Akiko Yano, GO GIRL)
Our House
(composer: Eric Schorr, artist: Susan Botti)
9/11/2001
TRIAGE
Nothing else to do
But love while waiting. We hold our hands
To the flames until we no longer know
What we wait for.
THE EMBRACE
when the man cannot love earth
any longer he is also deciding
to leave, when the man believes
we can no longer hold him
up into the light, when the man
is finished with the harm
done to him and those he watches over,
when the man finds I am necessary
face to face, when the man concludes
through me he will get there,
when he puts himself altogether close
with his plan of salvation,
when the man needs to go beyond
my body with his body, to take it
all apart with the slightest turn
of head, finger, a drawing back
of the lip, whatever was true before
now collapsing on itself until
I too have nothing left
except what refuses to burn and the smell
of forgiveness on the breath
THE LAST MINUTE
As you hold the child tight, huddled,
She asks for one more wish and someone pushes
You to the back, yelling you will soon
Be home. Is this moving away or toward–
Even air cannot find where to go,
While you make a way through one last story,
A fumble of buttons, her eyes held to yours
With everything she knows, her voice in
Your voice to drown out the engine
Burning as it was never meant to,
Such acceleration and so much light,
For many are the angels
On their knees, hoping to be first
As the City rises up to greet you
With some on their way to work, some stepping out
To take in the perfect day.
WHERE WE CROSS
How strange to believe in air
Large enough for us all.
No comfort, the thing we live.
The undersong of blood and so much on the mind
Does not know where to go.
If I climb back into what happened,
I might meet you and hold out
What I can toward the eventual,
For we did begin from the one ground,
From where our mothers still watch. What I wish
Is to breathe into your mouth a space
For all this difficult bending, as if
It were beauty, as if it were the only place
Left for those who tried so hard
To hold us apart that we came together.
WHEN ON THE THIRD NIGHT
Turning back, the body became statue
While what tried to reach paradise
Kept landing on the ground beside you
Still in a tremble, the descent of paper
Like birds burning, air no longer
Itself, ash resolving
Everywhere, over trees holding up
Like virtue, like allegory,
Where some try to leave by taking others
With them, where those with something to say
Lie down with those who have nothing,
This place where you could never see
The stars anyway, the avenue, the bars
All shuddering when on the third night
Thunder, and a whole city held its breath.
IN LIGHT OF ALL
In light of all that has happened
Which you didn’t want to have happen, remember
It was going to happen even as you believed
It could never happen
And as far as knowing what happens next,
Nothing can be done except whatever possible
To make what you want have happen,
To also be present while it is happening,
To be there and to be able to say you were,
And to write it down for someone else to know
When they say that do not know what is happening
They can say they know what happened
While the light in which all that has happened
Happened in so many ways that finally the light
Became what happened.