FAULT LINE

On West Broadway, Wooster, Hudson, Varick
and Canal, I meet people
in beauty salons, cafes, boutiques,
at the newsstand. The talk
is the same -
where they were
what they saw, who they knew,
how the dust was so fine you had to wash
the walls top to bottom
again and again
and still particles were found
in creases, along the fine edges
of mirrors and on shelves.
"It filled the time after
with a sense of something,"
one man says. Mostly they speak

of what they carry
six months later.
The buildings keep falling,
falling, and then the next night
the same,
or different buildings,
keep falling and falling.
Some hit hard.
Others lie suspended behind their eyes.

One young woman from Kazakhstan,
four countries east of Afghanistan,
I had to ask,
tells me she is in the buildings
when they fall.
She hasn't hit bottom
yet, but feels closer each night.

In a churchyard beyond a fence
adorned with all those
good thoughts from around
the world - bits
of cloth, plastic bags and on one
limb a curtain, gray and torn,
hangs like a shroud.

SMALL MOVEMENTS

You are on a train, the one
that travels from Zagreb
to Novi Sad. It is quiet
in the dining car as you sit
watching the sun
rise, fat and juicy, like an orange
from Valencia in a place two
thousand kilometers east
of the Pyrenees.


A man of indiscriminate age -
gray hair, downcast eyes,
torn topcoat, shoes scuffed
and worn stands
beside the bar drinking vodka -
one shot after another.
You know this from the bottle
stationary, then not,
in front of him.

He doesn't look anyway
but down and up as he pours
from the open spout.
From the speckled spot
inside your right eye, you watch
him slowly remove a thick
skinned object from inside
his coat pocket,

place it under his chin.
The action is quick,
almost indistinguishable
from the play of sunlight
over the glass windows
in this pristine compartment

except for the sound -
a thousand banshees
scream through the hole
where the window used to be.

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