I was digging through my archives looking for nothing in particular. This is from 9/11/2002. Guess I didn’t much care for editing then either.
Beyond the Columbia River I harbor neither fictions nor implication, no illusion and no consequence. I entertain a larger world but not a truer one. Here I have lain on an outcropping of rock and God babbled his whole mad plan to me and the river sang her harmony and the hawk spread his wings and drifted on the current.
Past Lake Superior I am light as air and blue-green cold like ice prisms against a sunset. East of flagstaff I crawl to the road at night where shades of heat still linger. In the Mississippi I am the thick green that envelopes lovers and derelict boats. But I harbor neither fictions nor implications beyond the Columbia River.
It’s September 11 again and the nation is unsure how to act, where to put their hands, how to meet someones eye. I wrote the following dumbass thing on September 14 last year.
It’s a restless hungry feeling
Waking from a dream of separation
And finding yourself a nation.
And finding yourselves
A thousand mouthless wounds.
You had your morning coffee with her
Muttered an I love you
And her plane flew through a building
Into the pages of history
And she won’t be coming back.
The sky was cornsilk blue
And it will never be again.
No, no, no. I don’t have the skill to do this. It is a restless hungry feeling though. All I have is empty rhetoric, or pretty, sad phrases. It’s eight in the morning and my household is sleeping; my wife’s hair over the pillow and her eyes like a flaxen halo, the dog with a paw over snout and eyes curled at the foot of the bed. I woke from a dream of separation and find myself awake and separated, by dreams and flax and puppy paws. I want to wake like this in ten years; life is in its details.
We will remember the phone calls from the airplanes. We will remember the family, holding hands to jump together. We’ll remember the color of the sky, what we were doing when we heard, who we ran to comfort or be comforted by.
I don’t know that in ten years I will wake like I have this morning. This world changed that day, and so I will take in what I can of it. I wish I had words of comfort or wisdom for y’all.
My earliest memories involve war; returning to this country from Cambridge England and seeing soldiers in O’Hare. Being tear-gassed at eight years old, the trial of Lt. Calley and what it meant; Who is culpable for the atrocities of war if not the hand what done the deed?
I’ve seen a lot of this world, maybe not a lot, but enough, I’ve seen enough. I am not scared of dying. I am terrified of outliving my children or my wife. I am terrified that my eight-year-old question of this world has never been answered to my satisfaction.
That is the next step. War.
The plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, they say, was due to the sacrifices of a few brave people. Knowing they were going to die they sacrificed themselves in a way that protected and saved others from getting killed. We will be going to war to avenge their deaths, too. Heroes of pacifism, sacrifice for the sake of others. We will kill and allow our young men and women to die for their sake? Maybe we should just collectively pee on their graves. They died so others wouldn’t have to, not specific others, just others.
That is the next step. War.
There is nothing sweet in the taste, nothing romantic in the notion, no way to walk away feeling unscathed and believing everything will be all right. Large groups of people shoot at each other and when they run out of bullets they stab at each other and when the knives are broken they bite and scratch and claw until the other side is all gone or so fucked up that they can’t or won’t fight any longer. You can complicate things with politics, philosophy, religion or patriotism, you can trot out all your warrior poetry, your righteous indignation, your moral imperative, doesn’t change what a war actually is and does. From the first one to the last one; a bunch of people trying to kill one another.
This is what we’ll do as a body politic with our grief. We’ll go kill us some ragheads cuz this time the gooks are our buddies, and we gotta protect the kikes, maybe if we just send the niggers then it’s a win win situation, yehaaa!
Yeah, I know the speechs are nicer than that, couched in a civility and the grief of a frightened racial conscious. That’ll change soon.
Again my apologies, Odland, I’m still not sure what to say or how to say it or whether to keep my mouth shut. The latter probably being the better part of valor.
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