ManicDDaily

I’m trying trying trying to work on Nanowrimo, but instead I wrote a new, kind of random piece, for a site hosting an event called Imperfect Prose.  This prose poem is very imperfect, but came to me walking home through downtown NYC.

Feeling Human in Downtown NYC

I am thinking, as I walk past Ground Zero–I am not thinking, as I walk,
of Ground Zero, but I am thinking as I walk past, the tall wire fence
on one side, the red neon storefront on the other, of what keeps us human–what
capacities–and my mind, not thinking in the least bit about Ground Zero until
now when I see myself in my mind’s eye
walking there, the sidewalk dark as a night that is not blue
as this night is, this night sheeting Church Street, the lights of the scaffolding–

I am thinking that it has to do with pain–first, the inability to remember
pain.  By this, I mean to recreate pain, to physically call it back,
to make one’s self feel again a pain
not currently manifest–

And I think, as I walk past Ground Zero,
of the birth of my second child, of the tan scuffed front seat
beneath my grip–I was sitting in back–of a car service station wagon
somehow so  different from the midnight-colored seat of the car service sedan
that took me to the birth of my first child, and yet in those moments
that followed each contraction, like the very same ride.
I know this pain, I kept thinking, intimately, astonished with each wrench
that the memory had not imprinted itself like
a difficult scar, to be felt whenever touched, to be felt
when even approached,
and yet, even now, even as I remember so exactly the white slant lines on that
tan seatback that looked as if someone had run a dull knife across it,
I cannot come up with the pain, but only my reactions to it,
the way my upper torso tried to arch from the lower,
the way my mind
scrambled like junked marbles,
the disbelief that pain like that
could ever be part of the natural order of things, the
terror that surrender
might just be meaningless.

And then I think, as I get to a corner–there are stairs on one side
leading up to Brooks Brothers, and on the other Liberty Street
where the old Deutsch Bank building stood, killing two more firemen in its
dismemberment–but I don’t think of them, the weight of machinery smashing
through broken, mismanaged, floors, nor even do I think of how, just across the way,
shadows may still hover, escaping flame–

I think of the ability to imagine pain–how this same body
that cannot recreate its own torment–how it will, if
fully human, cringe or stream with tears
at the sight of a blow, at the muted thud of kick, the
torn cry, the fall, the hew, bang, loss–there
was a man flat on the floor of Grand Central yesterday, feet too neatly
askew, with blood blooming on his forehead like a flag, the soldiers–we have
those now–and police stilled beside him in a watchful pentagon.

I had to be careful then at West Street, as I walked and thought, because it’s hard
in this part of the City, the scale aggrandized, not to be hit by
a car,
how the inability to remember pain allows us to
go on, while the second–the ability to imagine pain–makes us to stop–
(or stop that which should be stopped)
only I think now, as I write this, of all those spirits in the air, and
the blossom of the fire balls, the reeling cry of the street, the blurs of smoke
and dust and all those wisps of photos (the
missing, not to be found)
and my heart finds suddenly that it does remember pain,
and that it can feel that remembered pain,
again and again and again,
even though I cannot think of anything I personally
truly
lost upon that day, anything that I could call
my own.

This entry was posted on November 2, 2011 at 8:59 pm and is filed under New York City, poetry, Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: feeling human in downtown New York, how reactions to pain make us human, Imperfect Prose, manicddaily, Manicddaily prose poem, thinking about Ground Zero 9/11, what makes us human