Going to Zero

but I didn’t stop, and when the train reached the Stock Exchange
the Yom Kippur streets were quiet, and the bronze statue of Washington
was camouflaged by national guard. I was walking my old mail route now

like a drunk knocking into people, almost hit by a cab
until the roped-off streets cut me at the arm. At Broadway and Liberty
the fences wound around the bursts of dust rising

over the cranes and bulldozers, over the punched-out windows —
I stared through a piece of rusted grid that stood like a gate to the crystal river.
I was sweating in my sweatshirt now, the hood filling with soot,

as I watched with others drinking Cokes and eating their pizza of disbelief.
Zero began with the Sumerians who made circles with hollow reeds
in wet clay and baked them for posterity.

At Broadway and Liberty. At 20 floors charred and standing.
At miasma people weeping. Anna’s Nail Salon, Diakichi Sushi,
the vacant shops, stripped clean in the graffiti of dust-coated windows.

Something blasted from a boom box in a music store,
something, in the ineffable clips of light,|
disappeared over the river.

Reprinted from Peter Balakian’s Ziggurat, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010 (paperback forthcoming, 2011)