September Morning, 2001

The sky was the kind of blue that makes you think nothing bad could happen— which is how you know you're still in the before. Someone was making coffee. Someone was late for work. Someone was arguing about something that would never matter again after 8:46. The buildings stood the way they always stood— so permanent they'd become invisible, the way you stop seeing what you trust will always be there. Then: the sound that divided time itself. There is no poem for the falling. There is no metaphor that doesn't insult the gravity of actual gravity. So instead: the firefighters who went up. The phone calls that said only I love you. The strangers who held other strangers because holding was all that was left to do. We were told never to forget. We haven't. But what we remember is not the falling— it's the reaching. The hands extended from the rubble. The hands extended toward the rubble. The sky that September was the kind of blue that still makes me flinch— not because of what fell but because beauty and horror shared a morning and neither asked permission.