Through song

I'm hitting some kind of saturation point. The articles and commentaries *about* September 11th, and all it has pulled into its event horizon, continue to unfold like iterations of the dialogues I hold in my mind. Everything that is said, I have thought. Everything that sits between the lines is between mine. Every edge that cuts, every silence that persists, every word unwritten - these, too, are mine.

I keep staring at waves - waves, upon waves, upon waves that wash in - breaking over me, and slipping into the beach of me, the sand of me...the warm, packed, sun-drenched wind-swept sand of me.

My thoughts, these fragile, flimsy constructs of floating bytes of history and reason, are no match for this particular tide. Mores the pity. I've become rather attached to my thoughts, and my capacity to think them. Finally I can own them, hold them in my hand - and now, within my grasp, they're just too small to hold the world I see.

Today, after the news and all the valid points-of-view, they're old, elaborate and brittle shells whose occupants have left them, like horseshoe crabs and abalone abandoned on this strange flat beach of world-examination that I find myself less often in.

They ring hollow, these shells that seemed so recently to hold my understandings of the world I wander in, and when I put them to my ear I hear the old faint roar of something, once, but now no longer, there.

The history has lost its fit. Everything I knew, I don't.

And still, the day is still, and perfect. The sun fits low between the reddening sweet gum trees, and hits a spider's web - no, two - out to make their last fat catch before the frosts and winter winds make dining out too great a chore. You know, without a friend the cold is just a bore.

Our music on this afternoon (for Barbara's come, and it's time to play) is like that web that silvers in the sun, catching all the sadnesses and laying them out into the air around us, spinning off this planet in a spiral twirl of sound that stretches aching down the long galactic plane, behind us - splashed through meteors and comet tails and someday stars - and fans out in our two heart's remarks, our own soft trail of tears.

It's nice how you can sometimes wander backwards into a poem, and it tosses surprises - like flowers on Wednesday - for you didn't even know it was waiting there, for you.

-- Anonymous, October 17, 2001