I'll read my September 11 poem.
[INAUDIBLE] I have a poem called "10 Ways
to Get Ray Charles and Ronald Reagan into the Same Poem."
I've got one through 9 and I don't have 10 yet.
So, it's funny.
They died within a few days of each other.
And I started to just see similarities
because Ronald Reagan was very absent from his body
when he died.
And Ray Charles hadn't seen anything.
And I started seeing these strange links between the two
of them.
And of course being a poet, I decided
to exploit that immediately.
OK.
This is "To the Woman, Not Trying to Fly,
who Fell with her Legs Closed, Arms
Pressed Against the Front of her Body,
While Primly Clutching her Purse."
One.
You didn't topple, cartwheel, or plummet.
You believed that your descent, while swift,
would end tenderly, and that there
would be things to attend to.
While others fell past you screeching for mercy
and splayed like stars, you aimed your pinpoint of body
toward a future that included checkbooks,
snapshots of squirming children, a scarlet stump of lipstick.
There would be need for these things again.
Your keenly ordered mind couldn't help but see
the vertical drop as mere inconvenience.
You didn't hurtle, flail, or pinwheel.
Your eyes straight ahead, your sweet drumming heart
struggling toward a fuss.
You were most concerned with decorum, the proper way
for a lady to manage adversity.
I watched your fall and readied myself,
for I been called a lady too.
I would be here to help you to your feet,
to brush strands of the sky from your eyes.
Two.
For poets, these are difficult days.
We have at our disposal every letter
of every syllable of every word ever written or spoken
in any language.
But when I attempt to bellow the word, fly,
I discover that it can no longer conjure sound.
There is the man with his skin fused to his shirt.
Perhaps he can tell us why.
There are hands, shoes, cell phones, sudden gifts
and the grit and groan.
Maybe they hold a clue.
There: that blue Toyota Camry sitting
for nine days in the train station lot in Tarrytown.
There is, have you seen him, her, them, she,
was he, brown eyes, light lip, tattoo,
there are those thousands of mothers
suddenly convinced that their children had learned to fly.
And most certainly did.
I am a poet.
That means that I am God most of the time.
Poets can set monstrous eyes deep
in the chubby faces of angels.
I can roughly grab the shoulders of a woman who
is plastering yet another flyer to yet another pole.
And I can shout, your daughter cannot hear you.
She is not lost and thriving in some pocket of air.
She is dead.
But when I'm merely human, keeper
of checkbooks and children, when dawn
demands hard copy of the stanzas I've written in the night,
the words are limp and not breathing on the page.
Their lives lie far below the surface of me.
They can't hear me coming.
And there is no air.
Three.
When the sea is, when we are, when our parts and the world
is back to normal.
When we can fly, drive, walking, inhale, without believing it
is possible to die from it.
When we stop glaring at every brown skinned,
silk haired, scraggly beard, turban, burqa.
When everyone who hates us and everyone we hate is dead.
When Afghanistan is over.
And our boys, husbands, sons, brothers, sisters, daughters
are back home safe on this sainted soil.
And the rubble that was the Towers
is swept and gilded smooth.
And fallen ghosts have found their feet and slithered away.
When it's OK to get sputtered up about no tax day
or shark attacks as a continuing phenomenon.
Where it's OK for someone sitting next to you in a bar,
yes, you have permission to get drunk again.
When it's OK for someone sitting next to you to say,
hey, has anyone looked at Gary Condit for this World Trade
Center thing?
I mean it sure got the focus off him.
His timing was sweet.
Hell, he could have pulled Chandra's head
out of his freezer and said, hey, hey!
Check this out.
And nobody would have even had time for that.
When it's OK to laugh at that.
When you can listen to this poem and feel
removed from it, as if this dreadful thing
happened long ago in a place that can't be touched.
And after all stranger things have fallen.
When you can finally smell cinnamon and hairspray
and coffee splashes against the curb and not
smell the dust of it and all those gone thems
that were there.
When you are once again counting calories, comparing light beers
and not caring if Whitney Houston is hooked or unhooked.
When things are back to what they were before
they weren't anymore.
My neighbor will finally pull the American flag
from the tip of his pickup truck Santana,
and stare at me in silence, forgetting that he called
me sister, high-fived me.
Talked about black and white against a common foe.
When the wind comes when we believe
that there is no longer a foe.
There must be a foe.
There must always be a foe.
That's the moment he will catch my eye
and hold it and think to himself,
what are you looking at, nigger?
Four.
My granddaughter is obsessed with the drawing of stars.
Each point must be perfect, meticulously
measured, twinkling beyond all reason.
We have experimented with the most efficient ways
to manufacture whole crammed parades of starlight.
We feel entire pages with nighttime skies
with no fiery wink is allowed to flaw.
Why are you so worried about how the stars look, I ask.
Grandma, she says, in that slow exasperated whine
that makes me feel feeble and clueless and utterly loved,
a star has got to be perfect before God lets it fall.
[APPLAUSE]