Seventeen years, okay, since downtown
Manhattan, pulverized, mattered to everyone
Way out here, since you could stop anywhere,
At any gas station or truck stop in the West,
And find signs of solidarity and sympathy
For New York. Seventeen years of slow war.
Who will be what? The characters speak now
In accents that never existed except as accents.
The real dialects left to us divide by convictions
Not pronunciations. Votes and bumper stickers,
The choice of preferred sources of news,
The choice of which freedom, which amendment
To consider endangered and worth a fight,
The very definitions of life and value and rights.
All of us claim to have chosen our roles but
None of us were given exactly our choices.
There is a cast of angels in heaven,
Of devils in hades, of ghosts in old closets
And stairwells. We move among them.
We are all tourists outside of our houses and cars.
The heat threat today will be extreme.
The rangers and officers will patrol the park slowly,
Looking for the usual minor violations.
The stones will continue to bake and to crumble
But so slowly that to see them shift like fire,
Like actual flames changing shape, would require
Turning all the tribes of us who visit them
To try to recapture our lost sense of wonder
Into blur, flicker, combustion and nothing, like smoke
Evaporated, only faster, like a shared belief that we
Were exceptional, that all our furies mattered.
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