Where Are the Angels Dancing Now?

Beetle dancing on a pinhead

In Boulder, Colorado, the skies were even bluer if it's possible. Hard to say. All our memories of the New York sky filled up with so much smoke, so many little black stick figures falling in cartwheels through their final morning.

Some mornings the bus ride to work was quiet. We Americans tend not to talk to much to those we sit next to on public transit. Heck. We tend to not talk much to those we sit next to at the dinner table. But once in a while, given a random dynamic and the right combinations of loquaciousness and people, the bus in a small city like Boulder can be lively with conversation and the laughter of friends meeting.

This morning, as I took my seat and began my customary settling-in, something was already wrong. There was talk going on, a man's utterly solemn voice was speaking to someone with an equally sonorous tone, and yet the air was so thick with with words that would never be said only falling girders could have cut it. What was not said was deafening.

Slowly, like a slow motion, puzzling somehow, the reality so far from anything previously known that it took a while to clarify---why did those white clouds rise from the ground instead of drifting across the skies? where were these voices coming from and what were they talking about in such loud voice that everyone in the bus looked frozen?--truth dawned that morning, broke like a gap-toothed grin. Truth that would never allow the world to look the same.

Bus drivers don't broadcast radio shows on our buses. Until that morning, I didn't even know buses were equipped with radios. "There is apparently a great fire on at least several floors of the tower where the collision occurred." What disaster was this? Where? There was a radio broadcasting in the bus that morning, and in the silence through which it fell like bricks you could hear a pin drop and the pitter patter of angel feet dancing on the pinheads.

Nothing would ever be the same, world without end: Amen. God bless those who were there that last morning of American innocence; God save those who destroyed American innocence. The world needed this one last safe harbor of hope, and now it's gone, covered with dust and glass and those broken girders like the bones of the last dinosaur. What have we all lost.

"Laureate"
July 2010

You know, WS,
that when the girders
come crashing down they
spare no one, not prince
and not poet. You know
that when the trees fall
there are no intrepid Girl
Scouts skipping down the
forest paths in search of
rare wild trillium or the
fairy's spagnum moss. You
know that when our wise
and measured words rise in
clouds of white ash from
the wreckage the birds too
will stop their fool singing