Sep '02 [Home]
By Degree 365:  Year One of 9/11

Special Selections:Point of Entry


Vicki Hudspith
Within the Hour

The One of You ~. A Confetti of Voices ~. The Call to Prayer
~. The Momentary Worship of Midnight ~. My Disaster



Image:  "EVE A World Trade View From 92nd Floor
With Shadows of Trade Towers" (oil on canvas)
Artist:  Marjorie Portnow


Headwaters/Hudson Press

. .
The One of You


Water cuts through rock
Love cuts through sleep
Days move as water moves
As one note follows another
I am always the one of you

That imagines heat and flood of sun
The river, being the sweat of gods
Wiped from the sky
Therefore understands why
I use my hands to hold the wind

Pulled by my desire to fly
In this trust
I am carried into the opaque eye
To lay my heart on this vast shoulder
In a yawning smoke of exhaustion

Good times were burning
In a car cigarette lighter
Circles burnt in the clouds
The occasional rock working loose from the bluffs
To catapult off a ledge

In an issue of scale
Arriving big enough to crush a car
Thus the river aligned with danger
Night became bigger
Silenced the Budweiser tribes

Voices drowned by outboard motors
A river cuts like a heart
So with morning in my eyes I needed the wind
To talk with you
So you could hear water run over my ribs

While tides had their say
I leaned on changes in the colors of seasons
The light you brought to what I wanted
Before shadows toppled
Spilling into my river


~ .

A Confetti of Voices


We know the shadows
Better than we know ourselves
Feign surprise at how frail they are
How they vanish
When we step into darkness
How unfamiliar they are with memory
Or brilliant fragments
Caught in freefall by the sun
Embracing the monstrous

But we do not own peace
Just as shadows
Do not own defeat
And the metal sleeves that flipped through sunlight
Did not mean to appear so gay
As they tore away from the two great pillars
Scattered with all the strength of air

There will be no comfort
Except in small acts and daily tasks
As we stand in the shadows
Which must leave us
As others have gone
An out-of-focus memory of terra firma
Refracting in the confetti of voices
That flew from those pillars
The last free notes in a blue sky


~ .

The Call to Prayer


             I

I awaken to the call to prayer
Mountain altitude, thin air
Mosques visible through the haze
Drink the juice of pomegranates
To dilute my blood

I awaken to the call to prayer
Sun pierces my skull
Voices ring
Across the heat of flat bread
Scatter down the mountain


             II

If I could pray all day
What would I say
Would I say what I had to

Or would I spare God's feelings
But then, He knows
I'm just one of His little clowns


~ .

The Momentary Worship of Midnight


We travel by train to rail's end
Into the swirl of desert heat
Pretend to be brother and sister

The communal water glass
Dipped into the same water again and again
We go thirsty, dry heat villages

Waver beneath sand and sky
We travel by bus till it gets a flat
Unload for hours on the road

I play kalimba, stay calm
As desert gangs arrive
They regard the kalimba

Ask this bus of poor Afghanis
What we have
Listen to me play

At a nearby hotel, you, aged thirteen
Must sit on the other side of a curtain
Eat with men, I dine alone


~ .

My Disaster


No one wants to look at my disaster
It has become a construction site
A reconstructive center of trucks

Nodding cranes
Starving ballerinas
Dip into cooling lava

At night it is flooded with unyielding white light
Bouncing off random windows
A bathing suit dressing room, a reaper

My disaster is receding
It encompasses less and less of every block
Fewer streets know it each day

My disaster is still a disaster
But autumn is faithful and refuses winter
Its place

Protective of my disaster, I do not want to let go
Instead, would like to embrace it
As it once embodied my horror

If the pieces are swept away
How will I measure
What I know?

Distraction is a comfort to my disaster
A baby sleeps in a stroller
Welcomed with the exhilaration of new information

Your brain knows my disaster
As a science fiction of vaporizing steel
And the plans I have drawn to rebuild my disaster