Pacem On The Terrace

Where were you that miserable morning, everyone wants to know but, more honestly, to recall as part of the national wallowing. I was where I am today, bending events to the will and need of the moment and sometimes calling it prayer. Only maybe that day it was alright to fear and feel sorry for yourself.

Han Shan's Ardmore pen pal says this: The memorials are to found among the living and built where living is hardest--say in Gaza, Haiti or Somalia.

Shit, I'm beginning to sound like the quenchless spectre of Phil Ochs. Please forgive me for sounding like I am making recriminations.

At midnight, the gateway to this wretched day, I was watching "Judgment at Nuremberg" with my girlfriend Mo, and we both felt those trials were the best memorial to what 9-11 made America become. Only when Bush & Cheney stand in the docket accused of war crimes will the ghosts of 9-11 find peace (if they have not already done so).

This morning, for reasons unknown or maybe unknowable, I took refuge in the last poems of Robert Creeley, written in the months and weeks before his death in March 2005, the same bereaved week as Terry Sciavo and a Pope. He is remembered as furnishing undying companionship. He speaks to the One of shared consciousness, of which I am trying to remain a stubborn part.

My lesson for this day, as I watched Obama reading from the Bible on TV this morning, was this: "With God on our side" is the ultimate expression of atheism because it bars God from taking his fullest residence and resonance in our Hearts where His Oneness and Humanity's are fully proclaimed.

Creeley knew this oneness of consciousness and therefore I find these poems appropriate for true remembrance:

WHICH WAY

Which one are you
and who would know.
Which way
would you have come this way.

And what's behind,
beside, before.
If there are more,
why are there more.


ON EARTH

One's here
and there is still elsewhere
along some road to hell
where all is well--

or heaven
even
where all the saints still wait
and guard the golden gate.


SAYING SOMETHING

If, as one says, one says
something to another,
does it go on and on then
without apparent end?

Or does it only become talk,
balked by occasion, stopped
because it never got started,
was said to no one?

--Robert Creeley, On Earth: Last Poems, New Directions, 2006, pages 40-42