"Letter from the Ruins."
It may be difficult from where you
are to imagine the Latin Americanization of New York,
the photos of the disappeared in the streets,
the terror in the air, shrines and altars on every corner,
notes left for Paulo Morales, Carmen Rivera,
Kenny Lira, the city inscribed
with messages and letters to the missing,
the dead who float like a presence in the air.
On the other side of the world in Afghanistan,
women persecuted by the Taliban risk their lives
by writing and teaching other women to read.
These messages become interwoven and rise
as a common prayer against violence and tyranny.
How does Santiago's pollution compare
with air inhaled at the foot of the disappeared skyscrapers?
The smell of those who have been sacrificed
impregnates everything from the subway to the mouths,
mucous membranes.
You asked me not to speak of physical effects.
But to what extent is a smell, the trace of an act, physical?
In India, a smell is absence transfigured,
a desire that manifests and projects as potential
of other future outcomes.
In the Kaushitaki Upanishad, air sacrifices itself
as it enters the lungs, and sound sacrifices itself
as word.
Every act is a sacrifice.
And we are all sacrificing ourselves each for the other.
And perhaps this is the body's infinite dimension-- death
and dissolution.
Here in New York, the world has changed,
and it cannot be described in a few words.
It must be seen and felt. The Vedas
say writing serves only to verify or reencounter
what we already see.
La ver dad es ver dadera porque se verá.
Verdad equals ver, infinitive, to see, plus dar, imperative,
to give.
New Yorkers call the void left by the skyscrapers
a hole, the hole through which the world's web unravels.
Inscribed on the threshold of the ancient oracle--
oracle, know thyself.
Every gesture, every instant, is a threshold.
And we choose to see or not to see.
But if we do not see, we can come to see.
In transformation is possibility.
"I dwell in possibility, a fairer
house than prose, more numerous of windows,
superior, for doors."
--Emily Dickinson.
US poets, as well as those who wrote letters and messages
to the disappeared, are the few dissenting voices here
that plead for peace not war.
Perhaps from fine dust and the persecution of writing
will emerge a new fusion of action and poetry
a new ethic of conduct for which beauty and fairness
are the only altar.
The Sunday before 9/11, I was writing in my notebook
at the edge of the East River in Long Island City watching
dusk fall over Manhattan.
As I wrote "give love in every exchange,"
a cloud enflamed with light settled against the silhouette
of skyscrapers.
It took the form of a pink eye and stared at us.
Then it dissolved and resumed its path as fleeting cloud.
The oldest poem known to man inscribed in an Egyptian tomb
says "let me see your beauty."
Mahatma Gandhi said "an eye for an eye
leaves the whole world blind."