Remarkable Dust

At night, all of this would look quite different. The darkness, would in fact, be as cover-up all over the place that may not seem as wild as it really is under that cover. Pull back any edge and discover some of how it used to be before you were here or before trees, or whatever you recall well was here. It might be difficult to find a location sufficiently separated from a place during the day so as to be so changed by darkness as to become unrecognizable at night, allowing for the discovery of how closely the place still resembles the historic past before these trees or before whatever still flies here, in fact, seems a fine darkness to us, yet may not be as endless as we want to believe—in fact, not far from here, across the river, we find a fusion, a helmet from a firefighter that has fused with his helmet’s light now that he and other firefighters have become more like miners, actually, to produce a look like what comes from the glow of a distant planet at the edge of our milky-way galaxy might produce.

Part of the remaining tower not pulled up was left standing, as if to say, it looked like a sad knife to me, “sad” because it wasn’t cutting a sandwich (such as what was once served at the eyes of the world cafe on the top floor where a worker stood rather immobilized while he listened to what sounded at first like a distant storm that approached and grew in size and strength and shape until he had no more questions)—about what was coming in when the front part of an aircraft was on the 90th floor with him. Then he had the enormous challenge of trying to get out.

    —He could not fly.—

And while perhaps not the best time to envy birds, he could not resist envying some of the birds he used to watch a safe distance across the river; he watched the fuselages land practically at his feet and felt himself back up toward the door which would prove to be the only way out, a way he did use, those birds still on his mind.

Sometimes he felt as free as a bird, and at times he wanted to feel even more of what a bird felt, especially when that bird landed and went home to a nest, ideally not through a fire so that the bird wouldn’t have that bit of confusion as available as a hat to put on while trying to find his way out—and he did find a safe place.

—He found a place safe to others who might not have had a good leader or the memory of an east flying bird to help lead him safely to an exit.—By the way, he did get out, and he was interviewed as a survivor. I don’t know whether or not he got a bird (the focus of the interview was his getting out).

Having seen a bird from across the river did help him, however, having been there as a small boy mattered.

On this anniversary, George W. Bush, the former president, usually shown reading from that school book upside down, or reading from any book at all, is not shown; instead I see a quote from him that didn’t come from that book: he says that he knew what he needed to do; we needed, so he used all the resources of our government to be resolute, and compassionate—he knew had to defend the American people.

Such as the ones without birds and who could not locate the Milky Way.