Naturally we go on, even though the great
double watermark stands behind everything now.
Even this poem—if you held it to the light,
you could see the Towers shadowing behind it, their steel
beams bare couplets of moonlight. How free
this poem might have been, I like to imagine,
if the Towers hadn’t shaped it. How free the air was,
before its division into good and evil, before
the planes, before the law of gravity. What law
could we possibly have passed to keep the air from leaning
one way instead of the other? Here we are,
in Delaware, a breath south of New York: whatever
shadows the City, surely shadows us.
And, too, we have these eroding beaches, poultry
manure greening the bay, houses spreading
across the broad expanse of farms. Still,
here comes this poem, setting up its boundaries,
its own little rules, trying to start over, to be
the kind of poem even kids can say by heart.
It wants St. Georges Bridge in it, arched like a dolphin,
the C&D Canal gleaming through it like a crack
in an egg lit from the inside. It wants to be the kind
of poem with snow geese lifting off from Bombay Hook.
Word by word it starts building itself out of nothing.
It listens to its heart, the encouraging beat of its heart’s
own law, law, law—except for
that double shadow, that one missed systole,
diastole—and then again the blessed law.