Out of the Blue

Up until now, the best poems I have read about September 11, 2001, have been Martin Espada's "Alabanza" and Glyn Maxwell's verse novel The Sugar Mile. But now I can add a third item to that list: Simon Armitage's "Out of the Blue."

In a 24-page sequence, Armitage puts himself into the head of an English trader who works at the World Trade Center. In section 4, he presents a catalogue reminiscent of Günter Eich's "Inventory":

Arranged on the desk
among rubber bands and bulldog clips:

here is a rock from Brighton beach,
here is a beer-mat, here is the leaf

of an oak, pressed and dried, papery thin.
Here is a Liquorice Allsorts tin.

A map of the Underground pinned to the wall.
The flag of St. George. A cricket ball.

Here is calendar, counting the days.
Here is a photograph snug in its frame:

this is my wife on our wedding day,
here is a twist of her English hair.

Here is a picture in purple paint:
two powder-paint towers, heading for space,

plus rockets and stars and the Milky Way,
plus helicopters and aeroplanes.

Jelly-copters and fairy-planes.
In a spidery hand, underneath it, it says:

'If I stand on my toes can you see me wave?'

Section 7 is a prose poem of the responses of the World Trade Center workers after the planes hit the buildings. Shortly before I got to the end of it, I realized that it reads the same backwards as forwards, trapping the people in the poem, as it were, along the lines of how they were trapped in the doomed building.

The sequence's timing is excellent—it is just long enough to make you forget section four, so when you get to the list of things found in the rubble in the final section, the return of the items from section four is all the more powerful.

And then the sequence concludes (reminding me, as I typed it in, of this):

Five years on
what false alarm can be trusted again,
what case or bag can be left unclaimed,
what flight can be sure to steer its course,
what building can claim to own its form,
what column can vow to stand up straight,
what floor can agree to bear its weight,
what tower can vouch to retain its height,
what peace can be said to be water-tight,
what truth can be said to be bullet-proof,
can anything swear to be built to last,
can anything pledge to be hard and fast,
what system can promise to stay in place,
what structure can promise to hold its shape,
what future can promise to keep its faith?

Everything changed. Nothing is safe.

Things

Listening to Tom Waits's Swordfishtrombones and listening closely to this one again:

SOLDIER'S THINGS

Davenports and kettle drums and swallow-tail coats
Table cloths and patent leather shoes
Bathing suits and bowling balls and clarinets and rings
All this radio really needs is a fuse

A tinker, a tailor, a soldier's things
His rifle, his boots full of rocks
Oh, and this one is for bravery
Oh, and this one is for me
And everything's a dollar in this box

Cufflinks and hubcaps and trophies and paperbacks
It's good transportation, but the brakes aren't so hot
Neckties and boxing gloves, this jackknife is rusted
You can pound that dent out on the hood

A tinker, a tailor, a soldier's things
His rifle, his boots full of rocks
Oh, and this one is for bravery
Oh, and this one is for me
And everything's a dollar in this box


*

And thinking of this one, by Günter Eich:

INVENTORY

This is my cap,
this is my coat,
here is my shaving set
in a linen bag.

A tin can:
my plate, my cup,
in the metal
I have scratched my name.

Scratched it with this
precious nail,
which I hide
from greedy eyes.

In my haversack are
a pair of woolen socks
and some things I don't
tell anyone about,

it serves as a pillow
at night for my head.
The cardboard lies here
between me and the earth.

The pencil lead
I love the most:
by day it writes verses for me
that I have thought up by night.

This is my notebook,
this is my canvas,
this is my towel,
this is my thread.

(trans. Charlotte Melin)