My life began with the fire,
glimmering in the birthwaters.
Beyond my bedroom wall
voices murmured a memory.
My father’s mother died
with her sister in the ladies’ room.
He said — If she had escaped to Shawmut Street,
been saved, nothing would be the way it is.
How is it? drifted over my route to school.
I stared at a wire service photo
fixed with brutal light, a firehose
snaking through soaked debris,
faces slack with shock, bodies
laid out on the sidewalk.
How compelling for a family
to have such a story to relate.
Nothing would be the way it is.
To speak of a desirable world,
the listening boy leaning in.
November in Boston, women
collapsed waiting for their coats,
the ceiling’s satinette billows
crackled and melted and were drawn
into their throats. A shoe
wedged in the revolving door.
A face pressed against glass.
The fireball — bright orange,
or bluish with a yellow cast,
or a blistering white.
The nightclub burned in minutes,
in 1942, with a sibilant exhalation.
My grandfather, sworn in, testified,
but a single night evades judgment,
bloated with unassignable blame.
Corrosive worm of remembrance,
allure of the lurid past,
the nozzle’s snout regressing
down the smoldering street.
Adoring the damaged world,
we abused it, we refused
to let the sea wind clear the smoke.
So now it’s time to decide how to move
within spaces on the sites of catastrophe,
how to regard the atria and the lobbies,
even as the alarms sound,
evacuations rehearsed, the streets
filling with imaginary survivors,
just as the boy, surviving boyhood,
said So that’s how it is, just before
sleep settled on him like asbestos.
***
This poem was published in the Washington Post feature “Poet’s Choice” on May 10, 2009. Click here to link to the feature.