Reflecting Absence

Manhattan is no place for a moonrise.
One must imagine its fullness
or be content with furtive glimpses:

a hopeful crescent creeping up 32nd Street
or the luminous glow of a waning half
on the Freedom Tower from Tribeca.

But now the moon has fled behind the world.
My ideology is stalled at Ground Zero,
trying to make sense of warring ideas,
the motivation of martyrs

and the unthinkable descent of
192,000 tons of steel
425,000 yards of concrete and
2,606 people into smoldering rubble.

The names of the fallen are embedded in steel
two inches thick, a permanence that will outlast
their brittle bones a thousand times over,

each word a name, each name a story
calling out from this watery grave.

But we are interlopers here.
We clasp hands and walk north
to a neighboring watering hole.
After all this dying it’s time
to forget about life for a while,
as a local bard famously said.

If death is natural then what do we fear?
Is it suffering or the oblivion of being forgotten?

You said you want to die first
because you can’t imagine carrying on alone.
I said that neither of us dies until we are both gone.

The tears started then
like a slow rain.
I cried on the subway and in the next bar
and long into the night

after we made love with unexpected ardor.
I wanted to embed myself
into the deepest crevice of your soul.

Much later I dreamed I was falling.
My tears were a tide that enveloped the city.
I saw our names
side by side at the bottom of the sea
but I couldn’t make sense of the words.

photo credit: Susie Baum