Erect

You were one year old
when the Two Towers toppled over
like the stack of blocks
you toddled into in the home video,
each cube crushing down
in a chaos of cute wooden colors:
white for the planes; orange for the fire;
red and blue for the uniforms
that ran in the front doors
and stayed.
Like the rest of us,
you were stunned for a second at the crash,
but then your hands flew up like aircraft,
and you giggled at the casualties on the carpet.

Now your memory of the event is purely external.
Every September your mom pulls the old VHS out
for the strange un-holiday,
and you watch the screen recorded on the screen.
You can see the bloom of smoke
trembling along with the camera in your mom’s hands,
your parents filling in the soundtrack
with sobbing and words they wouldn’t have said
if you’d been old enough yet to really listen.
And right when the camera zooms in
on the bodies falling along
the long, long sleek sides of the sky,
there you are, wobbling through the living room,
with nothing on your mind
but staying on your feet,
for you’re learning to walk—
you don’t want to fall.

And I feel the years push between you and me
like a pane of glass:
you live in the living room, watching from away,
while I’m behind the screen
covered in the rubble of the ash-and-terror scene,
and every fall I find that it is happening again to me,
now, still.

I look out at you in your audience view,
and your lack of memory makes you foreign.
This plummeting pain isn’t yours to hold;
you didn’t sit for six hours straight
watching and watching the same eight clips,
then standing in the parking lot of the gas pump
where a hundred cars had come to gulp down gasoline
and the passengers hunched up in groups
passing around stories to quench the panic,
and your best friend’s mom didn’t tell you like a fact
that the End Times had exploded open.

But as I nurse the burns still scalding me inside,
my roommate tells me it’s a blessing
that no one ever hijacked your heart.
You’re different, yes: you’re rising up, straight-backed
and wonderfully unremembering;
you’re the dawn winking up through
this old still-choking smoke,
and while we hold out for you the debris of our history
you hand us blueprints of hope.

And by the time the video ends,
both of your parents have shattered down onto the couch,
and they don’t notice now,
but one day on a replay
they will realize that you made it
all the way across the room,

the only American that day
who still knew how to go on
standing.