Why not say what happens?

I

Of icons. Of divination. Of Gods. Repetitions without end. I have it in my notes, a translation from the Latin, a commentary on The Book of Revelation--"the greater the concentration of power on earth, the more truth is stripped of its power, the holiest innocent, in eternity, is 'as though slain ...'"

It has nothing to do with the apocalyptic. The seven-headed beast from the sea, the two-horned beast from the earth, have always--I know, I've studied it--been with us. Me? I'm only an accessory to particular images.

II

According to the translation of the police transcript, the sheik--the arrested head of the cell mockingly said--in a plot involving a chemical attack, needs, simply, two or three young men with brains and training with nothing to gain or lose, not an army.

It doesn't take much these days to be a prophet. Do you know how much poison can be put in a ten-liter barrel? You pour it and spread it, then you leave. The web is, prosecutors believe, so intricate, the detainee, they think, may also be a member of cells in Barcelona and Frankfurt.

III

Yet another latest version of another ancient practice--mercenaries, as they were once known, are thriving, only this time they're called "private military contractors."

During the last few years their employees have been sent to Bosnia, Nigeria, Colombia, and, of course, most recently, Iraq. No one knows how extensive the industry is, but some military experts estimate a market of tens of billions of dollars.

IV

Autumn turned to winter and the site began to clear. The limits of my language are the limits of my world, said Wittgenstein.

The realization--the state of the physical world depends on shifts in the delusional thinking of very small groups. One of Garfinkle's patients tripped over a severed foot while evacuating the Stock Exchange. Several others saw the first plane pass right next to the almost floor-length windows of their conference room.

"When I'm not working, the last thing I want to do is talk about it," said one policeman, who, like many of the city's uniformed officers, is still working a schedule of twelve hours on, twelve hours off ... Shoes, books, wallets, jewelry, watches, some of them still keeping time ...

The congressman says he can't say for sure there isn't suitcase with a nuclear bomb floating around out there. Everything immense and out of context. The large item in the mud, one of the motors that powered the Towers' elevators. "It's intense"--says Lieutenant Bovine--"no photographs! This is a crime scene!" What happened was one floor fell on top of another, as many as ten floors compressed into a foot of space. What fell was mostly metal ... The cement vaporized ...

The "Night Watch" was what the laid-out scene looked like. The fences around the wreckage covered with T-shirts, teddy bears, and memorial banners signed by thousands of visitors; tourists snap pictures, and, subject to the way the wind is blowing, the air is tinged with an acrid smoke ... "Lost/Missing Family 1-866-856-4167 or 1-212-741-4626 ..." A Web Exclusive, the poet will speak about poetry and grief ...

The smells of burning wiring, dankness from the tunnels, the sharp and sweet cherry-like smell of death. At eight-ten on Friday two more bodies are found in a stairwell of the South Tower. Work, again, stops, and the ironworkers, who have been cutting steel beams, come out from the hole. The work goes on until well past midnight. More debris is removed, another body recovered. A group of ironworkers stands on a gnarled beam, one end of which juts over the pit like a gangplank. Three 35-millimeter movie cameras are placed on top of nearby buildings, each programmed to take a picture every five minutes, day and night. A bugler slips onto the site and plays "Taps."

V

That period of ten or eleven years--concerning it I can express myself briefly.

At some point, in collective time, electronic space turned into time. The miraculous multiplication of loaves was restricted to the rentiers.

A grappa in a black pyramid-shaped bottle was taken cognizance of, and, with no resistance, for the most part, no guarantees were made for the slow, the meek, or the poor of spirit, who, for reasons unexplained, allowed themselves to disappear into the long, red evenings, night's early gray-blues.

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 cassette-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.

VIII

My father?--my father was a worker. I can still hear him getting up in the morning to go to work.

Sadness, too, has to be learned, and it took my father time to learn it, but he did, though when he did his tears were never chronic.

As for the economies on which my parents' lives depended, they won't be found in any book.

IX

It's the details that dream out the plot. Rearrange the lies, the conceits, the crimes, the exploitation of needs and desires, and it's still there, the whole system's nervous system--inside it, at times, a dreamer at work, right now it's me. The air not yet too cold with winter, at a sidewalk table at the Cornelia Street Cafe--a dream, it's a dream, the dream of a dream song, the dream of a dream, a glass of Sancerre on the table, re-visioning, in a purple mist, a tugboat, practical and hard, as it approaches a freighter, black, with the red-lettered name BYZANTIUM.

X

Capital? Careful! Capital capitalizes, assimilates, makes its own substance, revitalizing its being, a vast metabolism absorbing even the most ancient exchanges, running away, as the cyberneticians put it, performing, as it does, its own anthropomorphosis, its triumph the triumph of mediation--and, let's not forget, it organizes, capital organizes, capital is "an organizing," organizing social forms.

XI

Murky pink above the Hudson against the shadows lingering still, the sky above an even blue and changing to a pale gray and rose.

A coat of snow in the park on Tenth Avenue, clumps of grass sticking out of it, in the late afternoon, in Druids, Sam Cooke on the jukebox, lines from an obscure tune from the box-set, "even my voice belongs to you, I use my voice to sing, to sing, to sing to you ..." The lives of the two or three others who pass through as close to you as the weather.

Walking back, the dotted lines of the lights on the Bridge, the sun blotted out by a burst of vermillion.

XII

I remember it--the gold burnt into gold, the gold on gold and on white and yellow, an incandescence condensing the sunlight, out-burning the sunlight, the factory molten, the sun behind it, in it, thin, gold, pig iron, a spray of fire, fly-wheels revolving through the floor, rims almost reaching the roof, enormous engines throwing great pounding cylindrical arms back and forth, as if the machines are playing a game, trying to see how much momentum can be withstood before one or the other gives way. I remember--down Sixth to Dowling, to Varick, down Varick, downtown.

A cat is in the rubbish in the street. The sun over Jersey. The gap at the end of West Street, the sun on the clock tower. The melancholy induced by the pressure of time, the wavering ambitions, failed ideas, time wasted.

The unexpected breeze, warm, the sense of the river. The sky, blue, a dark blue yet pure in color, not blackened or tarnished, above the low, old buildings, like a painting of something solid rather than the solid thing itself, a high and low composition. But what light there is in that landscape ...

Lawrence Joseph is the author of two new books of poems, Into It and Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos: Poems 1973-1993, which will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2005. A professor of law at St. John's University School of Law, he and his wife, the painter Nancy Van Goethem, live in lower Manhattan, a block from Ground Zero. They were barred from their apartment for a number of weeks after 9/11.