Rift

Rift

1.

The first Tower. Beneath it, where my son is, the subway
dropping him there. He is running,

thinking: There must be a gunman in the station, all the people moving
like a giant sea squid, climbing up

from darkness, up the stopped
escalator to the street with its lava
of screaming. Rage of paper,

windows flung out and raining,
blue seat cushions of an airliner
falling from blue sky. United,

he thinks. What the hell? he thinks,
running, as when he ran cross-
country in school, just turned

thirteen, the day he saw a baby
fall from a car, saw him roll
out onto the Riverway, the next

car coming, the mother, blue-lipped,
her voice shaming the vindictive
God: the same God my son is

calling on now, trembling
with the others in the shattering
from which he will be spared.

2.

An old soldier has picked
from the hillside, dried wildness—
marjoram, thyme, and cut, from

the olive tree, small branches
for the table. He lunches
on paté, sausages tied

in string. He studies his dead
wife's crayon-portraits,
the striped parade of ribboned

medals in their frame. Scrapbooks.
Postcards. A tape recording
of the marches of his war,

making of his life a little theater.
He has carried pain like a saint
into the forest, torn thigh raging.

Let dogs come if they want to.
Resist! Resist!
Any century can touch that wound.

3.

No one can find the driver of the black car. Is that he
against the wall, the body

in khakis and argyle socks? Are
those his canvas shoes? Another
man runs by, hands thrashing air.

I don't want to see this. I don't want to see. The driver's
door has slid away. Headlights

hang from the bumper, transformed.
Someone has quieted
the woman. I count six bodies

in the van. The windshield
is the darkest thing I've ever
seen. A policeman asks me,

Where is the driver
of the black car?
I can't say.

4.

This is where it happens: envy,
the urge to own the orchard, to take
it from the farmer by gun.

One push and the world is roiling.
History removes the oxen, the wagon,
the day and its meticulous weather,

three women in straw hats harvesting
rice.           Noise!
               The confusion

of seasons: trees falling, trees
standing naked in fire.
Daylilies and dragonflies,

ice beating their turquoise
wings. The catatonic shouts
of men. Fret and proviso,

artfully hidden battlements.
An amazing bomb
entrenched beside the bridge—

everyone screaming, the river
convulsing, spate of shadows
where a city once had been.

5.

At the red light I watch
the moon rising over the Public
Garden, yellowing the puddle

of an oil slick. In the crosswalk,
a cop, slamming a man against
the black hood of a car, the man's

hair flailing, his arm wrenched up
behind his back, too far. Sirens—
and the light turns green.

I used to be the Safety
on the corner, my long arms
waving the signal to cross.

At night, I'd white-shoe
polish my first-lieutenant's
harness, spit, make that

buckle shine. By whose
authority has everything
changed anyway?

6.

God once pointed to each
creature, reconsidered, shattered
the invented world on a whim.

It was a cold dark we slipped
through. The mountain
remembers sliding when earth

wasn't earth but gashes, all
the other planets flung
in a strange eclipse.

The wandering of mountains
is glacial. Percussive.
Nothing alive to hear that roar.

The entire proposition is wandering,
a galaxy of endeavor. On their backs,
our forbears pressed brushes to

clay ceilings, signaling themselves
in the limitless unfathom: caves
garlanded with dots and dashes,

the negative outlines of human
hands. They marked walls with
a coterie of mammoths, herds of bison,

riderless red horses—there will be
no dominion. Every figure, discrete
and irreducible. We are glued

together...