I may have flunked physics
but I was full of black holes
and wind that was slamming the tower
as I rose in the glass box
up to the 80th with a check
from Chilean Line. Black holes
opened relativity, created frozen stars.
In the sky lobby on the 99th I loafed
over headlines of John Dean’s testimony
and the suicide of a CEO—
I heard the relativity of the wind.
Everything was like. I was trapped in similes
I hated. I couldn’t leave my head
and so the sound was insidious, then beautiful—
Then … it was there
(if I say I once bird-bone pipes
in an old church in the Caucasus
like this wind blowing in the tracery
of the top floors, in the pipelines
and farther up.) Through the glass
I could see the other tower wavering—
the silver like broken mica—
I was falling matter dislodged by the idea
of a place from which nothing can return:
Jackie Wilson’s tremolo, Paganini’s
broken wires, or the frantic shaking
of the small bells at the altar
going up into some place
beyond the smudged-out sky
above the radar needle,
above the planes coming out
of the fog on their way to Newark.
It was possible to hoist an object
out of a black hole with a rope;
this bit of knowledge I was hanging on to.
ISSUE: Summer 2007