The Mechanics of Failure, and: Cloud Cover

The Mechanics of Failure

The day began with what airplane pilots call 'severe clear': seemingly infinite visibility.

—David Remnick, "September 11, 2001"

Jumpers, we called them, as if no nerve, no marrow, still heldto flight, as if falling

wasn't in the blood, and even today the longhabit of light might not

be broken, tornto gold laces like yellow ribbons

tied around oaks for the hometown hostage who finallydid return, blinkered

by camera flash, one year afterthe warm June evening I was married, absurd

in formal white, beneath those noosed trees nowtoo easy to read in curling photographs

as caution, as remember's threadwearing each swelling trunk to that familiar

arc of pain. Mostlythere is no warning: planes slam

into buildings, or you do your owncrash and burn, lighting life down

to a finger of ash. My ring, removed,left a groove that took years

to vanish, what seemed scar finallya fading, the way, after seasons, a grave settles itself

into earth, or a winter day's flock of starlingsdoes stop pouring east, though all morning

their crepe banner had seemedhorizon itself, the blackened sun still

enough to burn the watcher's eyesto the gold of its own sightless image, the faith

in vision what blinds. Despite their knowledgeof velocity, despite their ability to calculate

the gravity load of the cell, the fire loadof bone, some held plastic sheets, makeshift

parachutes, as they dropped, as if the worldwasn't wind, and fist, and whirling fragments

of paper; as if what we're falling fromisn't grace, isn't what,

a century ago, the newly arrived believedthey could recreate, releasing

one hundred European starlings to populatethis world new and strange

to the Shakespeare they'd readas home, setting in motion this morning's

rolling eclipse, five million birds in one gathering, onecity of flight; so when from the 100th floor, yes,

they did jump, the question, how much of our weightcan this world bear, had already been asked

as a storm of dark wings, a wake of gray lightstreaming behind.

Cloud Cover

Repeating the experiment makes it true, makes itscience, this string of gray days

its own conclusion. Each one a needle, a hummingbird sippingsomething sweet away. Every

childhood December, cedar waxwings, drunkon fermented crabapples, dove into the bay window,

demonstrating not sky one by one. Frozen smokeof a failed season, the one pondering

the possibility of dissolve, the row of icicles set tremblingdidn't fall. Far

from the neighborhood, the lake beckoned, crystal fist hoveringat zero, grained and gritted knuckles

buried in earth. What weather taught: milk breathon the pane meant self, what clouded

ice crystals swirling like ringworm come alivebeneath the doctor's hand, black light urging its entry

into the visible. Eight months a year we livedin winter. The forty words for snow

someone else's and too far north, each morning a silencecircled my bed, something coiled

like a fingerprint in the corner of that gauze veila fly's jags and halts wove high

in the ceiling the moment just beforewaking, when I is both line and spin, the needle unthreading

music from a record's engraved disk. Beforethe inevitable descent into the pane

of the body, a length of only like a nameinscribed on an id bracelet (what you were

to give awayto signify love), indelible as eternity

snagged into symbol, figure eights skaters still keep carvinginto that lake.