And their grandfathers? The Hessians attack
And the American commander folds;
We could have watched those losers made to file
Past jeering victors to the waiting holds
Of prison ships from our Tudor-style
Apartment building’s roof.
When, without warning,
Twin towers that rose up a quarter mile
Into a cloudless sky were, early one morning,
Wreathed in the smoke from interrupted flight,
When they and what burst into them were burning
Together, like a secret brought to light,
Like something we’d imagined but not known,
The intersection of such speed, such height---
We went up on our roof and saw first one
And then the other silently unmake
Its outline, horrified, as it slid down,
Leaving a smear of ashes in its wake.
That scene, retold from other points of view,
Would grow familiar, deadening the ache:
How often we saw each jet fly into
Its target, with the same street-level gasp
Of shock and disbelief remaining new.
Little by little we would come to grasp
What had occurred, our incredulity
Finely abraded by the videotape’s
Grim repetitions. A nonce community
Began almost at once to improvise
New rituals for curbside healing; we
Saw flowers, candles, shrines materialize
In shuttered storefronts for the benefit
Of those who’d stopped the digging with their cries
And those who hadn’t. None came out of it,
None would be found still living there, beneath
The rubble scooped up out of Babel’s pit:
From the clueless anonymity of death
Came fragments identified by DNA
Samples taken from bits of bone and teeth,
But that was later. In those early days
When we went outside, we walked among the few
Grieving for someone they would grieve for always,
And walked among the many others who,
Like ourselves, had no loss as profound,
But knew someone who knew someone who knew
One of the men who fell back as he wound
A spiral up the narrow, lethal staircase
Or one of those who tumbled to the ground,
The fall that our imaginations trace
Even today: the ones we most resembled,
Whose images we still cannot erase. …
One night we joined our neighbors who’d assembled
For a candlelight procession: in the wind,
Each flame, protected by a cupped hand, trembled
As though to mimic an uncertain mind
Feeling its way to some insufficient word---
What certitude could our searching find?
Those who had come here to be reassured
Would leave with nothing: nothing could be said
To answer, or have answered, the unheard
Cries of the lost. Yet here we had been led
To gather at the entrance to the park
In a mass defined by candles for the dead,
As though they were beyond us in the dark
With those who, after their war had been lost,
Surrendered and were marched off to embark
On the waiting prison ships. Here now at last,
They were restored to us in a sublime
Alignment of the present with the past.
But none appeared to mock this paradigm:
All that has come before us lies below
In layer pressing upon layer. …
Time
Is an old man telling us how, long ago,
As a child in Brooklyn he went out to play,
And prodding the summer earth with his bare toe
Discovered a bone unburied in the clay,
A remnant of those bodies that once filled
The hulks that settled into Wallabout Bay;
Time is the monument that he saw built
To turn their deaths into a victory,
Its base filled with their bones dredged out of silt;
Time is the silt grain polished by the sea,
The passageway that leads from one to naught;
Time is what argues with us constantly
Against the need to hold them all in thought,
Time is what places them beyond recall,
Against the need of the falling to be caught,
Against the woman who’s begun to fall,
Against the woman who is watching from below;
Time is the photo peeling from the wall,
The busboy, who came here from Mexico
And stepped off from a window ledge, aflame;
Time is the only outcome we will know,
Against the need of those lost to be claimed
(Their last words caught in our mobile phones)
Against the need of the nameless to be named
In our city built on unacknowledged bones.
After Wang Wei
in mem. V.L.B.
On empty hills, no one to be seen,
though one can hear some distant voices---
the sun shines through branches once again
and lights upon the blue green mosses.
Poison
A few drops in a hollow ring,
Or even less on a hatpin,
Gave peace to Emperor or King
When the Guard had fled,
And torch-lit foes were gathering
Around his bed;
This was the cure for life’s disease:
Observe how mindful Socrates
Drinks down the hemlock to the lees;
Watch Charmian clasp
Her ardent mistress by the knees
As she takes the asp.
For others, an unsought egress:
Many an ogre and ogress,
Whose motto was “Only aggress!”
Were shown the door
(Some regarding this as Progress)
By hellebore.
Nero, unhappy in his station,
Found poison won him swift promotion:
See Claudius, eschewing caution,
Greedily entreat a
Servant for yet another portion
Of the Amanita.
Secure inside his thickset walls
The tyrant ages and appalls;
Does no one hear his panicked calls
Throughout the palace?
Another king whose kingdom falls
To digitalis.
The rise of the middle class occurred
When all those kings had disappeared,
And tightlipped spouses, vexed or bored,
Learned of the kick
That oatmeal has, on being stirred
With arsenic.
And still to be found, till recently,
In the clandestine armory
Of CIA and KGB,
Was cyanide,
Used to dispatch an enemy
Or for suicide:
No agent’s training was complete
Before he’d learned how to secrete
Upon himself the bittersweet
End of his mission;
The little pill that, swallowed neat,
Ensured discretion.
How innocent such poisons now
Appear to us, for even though
Fatal, they were (no matter how
Grimly horrific)
Local anesthetics, thoroughly
site specific:
A dose intended for the Master
Might have dispatched his dog or taster,
But our poisons yield disaster
Without distinction,
And on a scale so much vaster,
That our extinction
Appe
ars to be quite plausible:
A momentary lapse, a spill,
And the stain spreads, insensible
To our lot;
Or just consider, if you will,
The microdot
Of some designer pathogen,
Dripped from the tip of a counterfeit pen
Or someone’s nose: less ‘if’ than ‘when,’
When you think about it,
An end that unlike hell or heaven,
Cannot be doubted,
And which replaces God and Devil,
Those outworn fictions, with a novel
Point of departure and arrival
For humankind;
One with no need for the survival
Of projective Mind
To speculate on what space is,
Or what we are. Us it erases
Without disturbing Gaia’s stasis
Or all we have wrought,
The slowly evanescing traces
Of one dark thought.
I have no wisdom to dispel
The unbroken gloom I foretell,
Nor any wish to toll the knell
Of parting day.
(I pinched that last bit---could you tell?
From Thomas Gray.)
Nor would I wish the world to be
Left to the darkness or to me.
But how successful, then, could we
Possibly be at
The task of reversing entropy
By decree or fiat?
Might there not be some good reason
To cut short the losing season,
And, if not with a dose of poison,
Find life’s antidote
In blade, revolver or the noose encircling
one’s throat?
Though we may not know where to send
The thank-you notes that we have penned
To the Imaginary Friend,
Much needs our praise,
And many need the help we tend
To get through their days.
So if there is no God to thank,
And if the cosmic data bank
Will soon, like the stock market, tank,
If things get dire,
Uncork one corking Sauvignon Blanc
Build up the fire,
Inquire not, nor seek to know
(As Horace told us long ago)
What hour of what day you’ll go;
Just carpe diem,
Catch and release the ceaseless flow
Of A.M. and P.M.
For, as John Maynard Keynes once said,
In the long run, we are all dead.
Until that happens, eat your bread
And drink your wine
As I with mine.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the editors of the following journals, in which many of the poems in this collection originally appeared, sometimes in different form or with different titles:
Alabama Literary Review “On a Roman Perfume Bottle”
“The Sacred Monsters”
Dark Horse “Mind in the Trees”
The Formalist “Poem for the Millennium”
The Hopkins Review “Near Jeffrey’s Hook”
“Souvenir”
“Support”
The Hudson Review “After 9/11”
“The Coffee House Philosopher”
“East Side, West Side”
“The Spaniard”
Iambs & Trochees “Who Knows What’s Best?”
Journal of Italian Translation “The Good Soldiers”
Literary Imagination “Ovid to His Book”
Measure “Theory Victorious”
The New Criterion “Some Kind of Happiness”
Pequod “To Himself”
Rattapallax “Autopsychography”
Smartish Pace “Brooklyn in the Seventies”
“For the End of the Age of Irony”
The Southwest Review “Poison”
“Words to Utter at Nightfall”
Stone Canoe “The Flower Thief”
The Yale Review “Getting Carded”
“After 9/11” was reprinted in the anthology Best American Spiritual Writing, 2006.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHARLES MARTIN’S most recent book of poems, Starting from Sleep: New and Selected Poems, was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Award of the Academy of American Poets in 2003. His verse translation of the Metamorphoses of Ovid received the Harold Morton Landon Award from the Academy of American Poets in 2004. In 2005, he received an Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His other books of poems include Steal the Bacon and What the Darkness Proposes, and a translation, The Poems of Catullus, all published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Other work includes Catullus, a critical introduction to the Latin poet. He is the recipient of a Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He served as Poet in Residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York from 2005 to 2009.
POETRY TITLES IN THE SERIES
John Hollander, Blue Wine and Other Poems
Robert Pack, Waking to My Name: New and Selected Poems
Philip Dacey, The Boy under the Bed
Wyatt Prunty, The Times Between
Barry Spacks, Spacks Street, New and Selected Poems
Gibbons Ruark, Keeping Company
David St. John, Hush
Wyatt Prunty, What Women Know, What Men Believe
Adrien Stoutenberg, Land of Superior Mirages: New and Selected Poems
John Hollander, In Time and Place
Charles Martin, Steal the Bacon
John Bricuth, The Heisenberg Variations
Tom Disch, Yes, Let’s: New and Selected Poems
Wyatt Prunty, Balance as Belief
Tom Disch, Dark Verses and Light
Thomas Carper, Fiddle Lane
Emily Grosholz, Eden
X. J. Kennedy, Dark Horses: New Poems
Wyatt Prunty, The Run of the House
Robert Phillips, Breakdown Lane
Vicki Hearne, The Parts of Light
Timothy Steele, The Color Wheel
Josephine Jacobsen, In the Crevice of Time: New and Collected Poems
Thomas Carper, From Nature
John Burt, Work without Hope: Poetry by John Burt
Charles Martin, What the Darkness Proposes: Poems
Wyatt Prunty, Since the Noon Mail Stopped
William Jay Smith, The World below the Window: Poems 1937–1997
Wyatt Prunty, Unarmed and Dangerous: New and Selected Poems
Robert Phillips, Spinach Days
X. J. Kennedy, The Lords of Misrule: Poems 1992–2001
John T. Irwin, ed., Words Brushed by Music: Twenty-Five Years of the Johns Hopkins Poetry Series
John Bricuth, As Long As It’s Big: A Narrative Poem
Robert Phillips, Circumstances Beyond Our Control: Poems
Daniel Anderson, Drunk in Sunlight
X. J. Kennedy, In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New and Selected Poems, 1955–2007
William Jay Smith, Words by the Water
Wyatt Prunty, The Lover’s Guide to Trapping
Charles Martin, Signs & Wonders