That Tuesday Night
That Tuesday night, after the
towers
burned & fell down-
town, after watching them crumble—
unlike the one Paul Newman
saved in Towering Inferno—
from the plaza in front of
Rosenthal
Library, after walking home
from the subway in the yellow
summer twilight, gagging
on the acrid air and looking
at the thick sooty column rising
downtown where the towers
had loomed Gargantuan on the
skyline
for over three decades,
I went to wash my face,
as though cold water and soap
would wake me from this dream
of violence and violation,
and I saw that man in the mirror,
red-rimmed eyes, yes, but
the same sagging wrinkled
skin, the same thinning,
graying hair above the same lined
forehead, and I knew that he
was lucky to have lived
to sixty-five—too young for WW II
and Korea Viet Nam
lucky to have lived his soft
American life without much fear
from abroad, except spotting
airplanes
as a kid and catching a breath or
two
as JFK stood down the Russians in
’62,
and in the glare of the bathroom
light,
the sirens screaming just up the
street
at St. Vincent ’s,
I knew nothing
could ever make me
safe again.
