At this point, I don’t know
What is more edifying—looking
At photos of the World Trade Center
Before and after 9/11 or reading
Eliot’s Wasteland for the nth time—
Any way you look at it,
It looks like we’re long past
The point of no return
On our investment.
was up there working on Wild Orchid with Fay Chin for the week before the
ReplyDelete(event) was daily in the book store about 8:30 am having coffee and a muffin & looking over stuff going into our book (Fay did the sumo-e & I did the poems) so on Sept 10 walking across the square Ilook up at tower closest to the Hudson and this lady passing says: "you can take an elevator up to the top". so, I go in, up the stairs and back around to where the line of tourists were queing to go up & I go to the front of the line to see what-is-what & they want $18 to ride up ! I only had about $10. decided to come back the next day with more money and go up... that would have been Sept 11 at exactly the time the first plane hit !!! when I got back to Fay's (I had been there for about a week) she said: :"Time for you to go home. The book is ready." so, on evening of Sept 10 I drive back to here and next morning I get up, turn on tv to see live coverage of the first tower hit... firemen going in (the cameras were right there and seeing little "dots" coming down from floors up ("those are people jumping out", says the announcer. one of the reporters inside (where I had been the previous day)
asked a fireman "what are those thuds?" "Bodies hitting the ground" Next thing I see LIVEON TV is that second plane coming around and into tower #2' Fay is about 5 blocks away. I didn't hear from her for about 10 days.
Wild Orchid was published in 2002 by tel let.
Ed, my man, that's quite a story; I'd say you were one lucky boy.
ReplyDeleteThis poem says something abut history, and what it says is pretty damned bleak... but one wouldn't want all that to get in the way of the Blogger Priority Hierarchy (autobiography über alles).
ReplyDeleteKing Kong was in the midst of a social date on the Empire State Building when the lone gunman of the Apocalypse issued the first edition of his little red book from Boni & Liveright, December 1922.
(His executors have appointed me to say this. King Kong's that is.)
Speaking of autobiography above all, I think it's high I come clean and confess that I, too, had a deadly crush on Fay Wray.
ReplyDeletePoor Fay -- caught in the awful wishbone aporia -- on the one side modern, on the other contemporary. What to do? Settle for the guy in the stinky studio-stuffed mohair monkey suit? But is he really postmodern? And what are those little thingies crawling around in his outfit?
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