From “Why Not Say What Happens?”

VI

Screaming -- those who could

sprinting -- south toward

Battery Park, the dark cloud

funneling slowly --

there are two things you should know

about this cloud --

one, it isn’t only ash and soot

but metal, glass, concrete, and flesh,

and, two, soon

any one of these pieces

of metal, glass, or concrete

might go through you.

As she turns to run, a woman’s bag

comes off her shoulder,

bright silver compact discs sent

spinning along the ground, a man,

older, to the right,

is tripping,

falls against the pavement,

glasses flying

off his face.

*

VII

Have I mentioned my grandmother,

my father’s mother, who died long ago

but who visits me in dreams?

It’s to her, mostly, I owe

the feeling that, in cases of need,

those transfigured in eternal love help us

certainly with eternal,

and, perhaps, also, with temporal gifts;

that, in eternal love, all is gratis --

all that comes from eternal love

is gratis.

*

-- “I couldn’t write about it at first, not in poetry,” Lawrence Joseph has said about the Sept. 11 terror attacks. But with the publication this month of “Into It: Poems” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 68 pp., $20), he presents his response in a variety of poems that, as he explains, “press back against the pressures of our changing realities. Before 9/11, those realities often included the realities of downtown Manhattan. That reality now includes not only my own personal experience of 9/11, but our collective experience as well.”