The Day After

     I

You are an old man, sky,
and today I know it. No toupee of clouds to distract me. Not even the busy
wisps of jetliners' contrails, which ordinarily
you comb from ear to ear, as if
vainly trying to hide a bald skull.

How peaceful it should be,
away from the TV, the radio,
lying on the grass in the backyard,
inspecting the inside of your cranium,
the different hues, how your temple
shades from milky at the horizon to a cobalt zenith. Reduced to your essential blue.

And your silence: a felt thing
that breeches the noise of my
neighbor haying his field, the rattling
of trucks out along Route 112.
Today, no distant drone of
airplanes speeding from Boston
to New York or San Francisco.
Never do I remember such
quiet from on high.

      II.

If I could, I would
disappear up into your
blue mind-that mandala for emptiness-
and start yesterday over:
Pull the burning buildings
up from the rubble,
make their storeys-so many
stories-touch your face again.
Whoosh the paper dolls
up from the sidewalk,
back into their office cubicles.
Restart the computers, the off-color
jokes at the water cooler.
Make the two planes unpierce
the skyscrapers' glass-and-steel skin
as if extracting a couple of splinters,
and fly them backward to Boston,
a film in reverse.

But nothing stays put:
The planes keep taking off
from Logan Airport,
following their relentless
course toward the twin towers
of World Trade, which keep
dropping, again and again, sending
buses and body parts down the
canyonlands of Wall Street.

     III.
I will ignore all the childhood
warnings, stare directly into your
fiery cyclopean eye,
and demand answers-
retinas already seared for life,
what do I have to lose?
Removing dark glasses,
I see a chevron of geese
wheeling across your brow
for their annual flight to South Carolina,
and two monarchs, their random tacks
across the garden miraculously
pulling them toward Mexico.
If nothing is new under your gaze,
not even yesterday,
teach me instinct again:
how to surrender,
how to ride the forward
strings of time.

-Susan Middleton

Sept. 2001