your life flashing before you now as if it were a movie,

  as some seeing it live & on tv thought it was a movie—but not you,

  so you move with the others toward the windows high up in the blue—

  some move like sleepwalkers, others screaming hysterically loud—

  move toward the clear windows you loved so totally to look out of

  as the flames, smoke, heat & terror increase—

  tell me it is a movie, you thought, a hollywood thriller

  & arnold, or bruce will come rescue us all soon, very soon—

  & you thought you could see your god from up here,

  inside, behind all this clear glass, where you took in such expanses,

  such power you felt, so high up, each & every day coming here,

  to witness all this sweeping glory was a miracle, now this sudden fear,

  this swelling madness burning a black hole through the miracle that is

  now a place an overwhelming fear, crawling like bile to grip

  your spirit in your stomach, as the billowing smoke blooms

  & flames keep licking toward you as you move with co-workers,

  move toward the blown out windows, what were you thinking

  as you climbed out on that ledge, a fierce wind up here licking,

  whipping around you like an avenging spirit, taking your breath

  away as you looked down, then stepped out into nothingness,

  tumbled head over heels, your clothes flapping & tearing

  wildly around you, the wind screaming, like you, for a moment,

  then it was over before it was over, though you knew what

  you saw before the end as truth, what were you thinking

  out there, when you saw the whole building imploding down,

  coming toward you like the hairy brown-gray legs of a tarantula

  spider, crawling down the sides of your beloved second home,

  so ominous now as it pancaked down, floor-by-floor at you,

  toward chief ganci, father judd giving final rites & so many others

  & when you hit rock bottom it all fell hard on top of you roaring,

  choking acid smoke billowing as from a phylogenic cloud

  after a volcanic eruption incinerated the day,

  then everything went black, black as the skins of delta blues

  singers from mississippi, whose voices imploded before they rose,

  rose back up like tonguing flames & smoke billowing black there,

  before they wrapped their black voices blue-black around song

  & turned pitch-black nights, tar-baby nights into blue days,

  down in the scorched earth grounds of unknown lynched bones,

  those black voices full of blue tones of raise-up redemption . . .

  but here, at ground zero, when the hush fell down,

  the voices went silent as ghost-people emerged

  & things would never, ever be the same again,

  things would never, ever be the same . . .

  2.

  9/11 emergency calls coming right at you

  9/11, emergency calls screaming

  what were they thinking as they steered flying bombs,

  flew them straight into their targets,

  what were they thinking, “why did they hate us so?”

  freaked out voices mutter

  9/11 emergency call coming right at you

  did we look into their eyes, how deep back inside themselves

  they were, burrowed back in their skulls, cold as pinpoints,

  because they had left all feelings behind

  inside experiences they had gone through full of chanting prayers

  five times a day, that brought them to this moment of redemption,

  high up in the crystalline blue, confused people all around them,

  going through fear, rage, quiet acceptance

  of what was about to occur,

  until they saw the towering symbols of capitalism before them—

  those seemingly impregnable double edifices of everything

  wall street stood for; power, arrogance, hubris & money—

  standing before them now, so very clear, so hard-on phallic,

  looming & glittering like millions of razors when sunrays hit them,

  glancing off those 43,000 windows, they were coming closer to now

  they were so very clear, looming, coming closer until

  everyone who didn’t know suddenly knew,

  as the flying bombs held on course straight as a crow flies,

  or a screaming arrow from the bow of an expert,

  everyone knew now as they flew into the looming hard-ons,

  erect with the blood of gold, silver & green backs & hubris,

  they knew as their panic shattered into countless shards of fear,

  as those 43,000 windows that were razors glinting

  when sunrays hit them suddenly blew out now

  like the pinpoint eyes of those who flew the bombs

  blew out, at the moment of impact, prayers chanting in their heads,

  then we suddenly knew, right before the world suddenly knew,

  heard 9/11 emergency calls coming straight through

  9/11, 911

  emergency calls

  coming straight at you

  3.

  it was a castration, pure & simple, a cutting off of phallic symbols

  of greed, money & hubris, they came down blooming clouds,

  blowback coming to wall street, turning it into a war zone,

  a war zone of weeping, screaming, unreal horror,

  clouds black as those delta blues singers, color gloomed now

  this once blue day, gone now, like the gold coin we knew this morning

  as the sun was gone now, like those once gleaming phallic edifices,

  everything down here was shrouded in mourning dustcoats,

  as if in a movie, stunned ghost people stumbled through streets

  ankle deep in soot & paper, wrecked fire wagons, police cars

  & bodies—what was left of them—& street lights glittering through

  the unreal light like flashing hyena teeth,

  blink down on paper clips, chairs, telephones, pieces of bone,

  shoes, blood & guts, shocked eyeballs looking up mute from the soot,

  glinting earrings next to hats, an arm, office supplies, pieces of paper

  fluttering through the stinging air like bat wings,

  gone now the innocence, gone the hubris of impregnability,

  gone now the arrogance, the jaunty haughtiness in the step,

  in its place this new blueness, a blueness of spirit, of whatever

  the future holds, a blueness of not knowing what you thought

  you knew, who the person standing next to you was, is, is he an arab,

  is he—or she—a terrorist, what does an arab look like anyway

  without a head wrap, or veil? a jew, an italian, an american indian,

  who, what? who? what? who? what? who? do they look like

  mirrors of ourselves? ghost people hiding in corners?

  white people full of anger? who hate everythingabouttoday,

  like timothy mcveigh whoblewupthenotionwhitepeoplecouldn’tbe

  terroists&noonepointedfingersat them, even after

  the uni-bombertheodorekocinskiblewup those people

  with those booby-trap letter-bombs, so who is a stranger,

  who can know you now, since you don’t know who you are yourself,

  you don’t even know what you’re thinking even now as you speak,

  because it changes from day to day, from whatever is said on tv,

  talking heads on talk radio shows, all the flag waving now,

  all this saber-rattling jingoism, boiling talk of war,

  it is a blueness of revenge burning

  red-hot through the language of the day—

  though this, too, in time will calm down, fade away—

  when the cameras drag slowly across the bombed out scenes

  shown daily now—though this, too, will fade in time—on tv screens,

  it reminds you of surreal disaster movies made in hollyweird,

  swarming with high-beamed lights, thousands of made-up

  extras, who shuffle through their shots with bone-weary faces,

  like ghost people, as shadows of soldiers with machine guns

  drift through the horror that is palpable now—

  though this, too, will wind up & fade away—imprints

  in soot the form of a footprint, a hand clawing as if for clean air,

  an upturned face frozen into a wooden mask at ground zero,

  though it looks like a movie this is real

  terror & panic, frazzled voices, real, the stumbling strides of ghosts

  the plumes of gray-black-brown smoke belching, flaring upwards

  to blanket this eerie, sacred burial ground of pulverized dust/rubble,

  soot-coats worn by heroic firemen & rescue people,

  all races of weary volunteers from everywhere,

  this spot marked forever by a jagged six-story tombstone—

  which, too, in time will be taken away—

  all that is left of two once gleaming 110 story towers,

  two phallic symbols seared into memory & onto postcards

  & 9/11 & an emergency call sweeping through manhattan,

  engulfing the pentagon, exploding in pennsylvania,

  spreading out to ensnare most of the globe

  9/11, emergency calls wailing through all of this . . .

  & what is terrorism but a faceless, invisible presence

  suddenly here, there, completely in your midst,

  then gone, then back again,

  like a sudden death on a highway in the form of someone

  drunk & out of control, in a runaway car hurtling right at you,

  perhaps, a mind-set blowing your world apart on a bright, clear day

  in september, or anytime, like now,

  in this eerie time in the world

  where there are two gaping holes

  in the snaggle-tooth skyline of downtown manhattan,

  two gaping, empty holes that ask questions,

  are silently screaming for forgiveness & redemption,

  two gaping holes that beg the questions

  will we ever be able to fake innocence again,

  howdy doody cornball smiles, daffy duck head-in-the-ground,

  black-birds-sitting-on-a-wire-in-a-row-follow-the-leader,

  wherever the bushies words say go, “let’s roll,”

  in this land of redwhite&blueapplepieflagwavingbombers?

  doesn’t all this saluting remind anyone of the slippery slope

  germans found themselves on heil hitlering genocide in the day?

  will citizens become suspect for not waving the flag,

  will things will ever be about peace & sanity & love & respect

  & different opinions listened to anywhere in america, now,

  anywhere in the western, christian world?

  9/11 emergency calls coming straight through to you,

  9/11 wake-up calls, wake-up calls, wake-up calls

  ringing up in the air, coming straight to you,

  sluicing through the soiled air voices of the blues

  coming straight at you, straight at you . . .

  RECONFIGURATIONS

  there are moments when we are what we think we are,

  bright suns burning deep with love, white moons glowing,

  lighting up the sweltering darkness, beauty,

  the center of our imagination

  but in revisiting old music, rhythms are sometimes heard

  in a fresh light, a language you thought you knew

  now sounds radically different

  in the way a musical phrase suddenly turns,

  makes your body move in a way you had hadn’t known possible,

  before, shows you, once again, surprise is always lurking

  within a moment of deep creation,

  so you follow this new way of hearing,

  a kind of reinvention in your ears, so to speak,

  it reminds you of a time you once knew, heard, without notice,

  a flaring cadence butaning a fragrant night sky

  inside a voice, a piece of music rooted in an expression suddenly

  there, transforming itself, is both familiar & unfamiliar, but there

  anyway, new your faculties, retooled

  fresh inside the center of your imagination,

  where you had refitted your faulties, retooled them,

  without knowing—the way you took things in—

  perhaps, you had fallen in love,

  or dropped out of love, who can say—

  but it had happened anyway, was some kind of miracle

  the way you had reconfigured things

  inside your spirit—red things turned into blue,

  metaphors pinwheeled into stars, became

  a kind of fireworks of language holding brilliant

  words, chords, shining faces spangling the darkness,

  where you lived, caterpillars became butterflies,

  babies killers, geometry architecture,

  night day, noise music, sounds ordered & shaped into forms,

  poetry sprang alive transformed by new images inside language,

  the way the voice digs itself out of a dark hole & breathes

  again in light, fresh air, is a miracle, eye tell you now,

  again & again, that reconfiguration is a miracle

  & a miracle is always a blessing

  PULSE & BREATHE

  for Charlie “Yardbird” Parker

  eye remember bone under skin as gristle of wings

  beneath bird’s feathered flights, solos, up in the tone,

  music inside syllables echoing light, up in the steep night

  transparent as an ethereal shimmering,

  as a shower of colors laced through the sight, is a necklace

  of white pearls strung around a black woman’s neck,

  from where we stand with plumes of flares in our hands

  we see her at the edge of a looming vortex

  as a fanfare of trumpets blooms from somewhere,

  she starts to dance a fandango with herself

  & everyone standing there, looking, is amazed

  WHAT THE POETIC LINE HOLDS

  the line can be taut as a straight clothesline

  strung across a patch of field full of sun

  flowers, a whip in the hand of a lion-tamer,

  cracking out commands, a geometric groove between

  two points, straight as an arrow flies true to the target,

  like a flat jump shot leaving the hands of Michael

  Jordan, with the game on the line, a ruled line,

  upon which sets a string of words perched

  like a flock of black birds gossiping high

  up on a telephone wire, their dark shapes silhouettes

  against a day sky, their black shapes holding true

  forms a series of black hole seductions for our speech

  to flow through there, is like what improvisation does whenever

  it changes up whatever is said inside & through a line like jazz

  riffs, is perhaps what “Bird” passed on to Miles in an instant

  of rare beauty, is what his sense of liberation was at that time

  & so on & so forth, ad infinitum, on the other hand

  the line can be as loose as a goose frolicking in clear water,

  shaking a tail feather baby, whatever the mind holds

  true as its artistic inclination, is what the poetic line stretches

  our deep limits out into, is a moment we can dive through,

  find the other side & that is what possibly shapes the line,

  whatever the imagination is able to manage,

  hold onto, the music there following a snaking flow

  of words, that act like notes embedded inside

  a composition, is what the poetic line holds, clues,

  perhaps a fragment, a sliver of bright sound,

  glinting, as a gold tooth hit by a glancing ray of sun

  can evoke a solo & so on & so forth, ad infinitum

  ONE SUMMER VIEW; IN PORT TOWNSEND, WASHINGTON

  for Sam Hamill

  soft blue wind caresses ease in off the sound,

  the waters cool surface shimmers

  blue diamond-rare, miles up in the air a trumpet slips

  glittering hard licks true & fast, slick as a moment

  eclipsed in a wink

  & quick as a hair-pin turn

  you’re looking out across the diamond-blue shimmering to see

  a low, long land mass rising & swimming out to sea,

  where the blue becomes a darker, deeper blue,

  where the land’s end is the brown-green

  sandy snout of whidbey island, seemingly swimming—

  a whale’s head jutting—out to sea, then back over here again, where

  green leaves brimming from branches & bushes are hands

  waving good bye, good bye,

  like farewells of weeping lovers,

  now you see trees standing guard, high on black bluffs

  overlooking the waters, foaming death as it exhausts itself

  washing on shore, as the trees above wave their branch-arms

  everwhichaway, like those of a music conductor,

  whenever the wind blows hard, the music

  a serenade of flutes imitating the tongues of breezes,

  this is what you see looking out the window of alexander’s castle,

  overlooking the straits of juan de fuca,

  at the tip-end of port townsend, washington

  everything serene here, blue, green & brown, sun-

  light dappling around edges, hard black masses—

  the shape of shadows—spreading, over which one piercing bird call

  tingles, pricks the senses

  as it wheels, slices its double-winged comma shape right through

  the blue singing, like a solo of miles davis cutting right through,

  clean to the heart, true as a surgeon’s scalpel,

  these moments are a shopping list of natural wonders,

  beauty, all the things we ever imagined leaping off of postcards

  we receive from faraway locations,

  most times always somewhere over there,

  on the flip side of imagination

  & then bam! it’s right there, dead center in a blind/spot,