In A Flash
—for Bill
Every now and then I pull up your Facebook post with that photo of you,
standing in the rubble of 9/11, in your Ladder 59 helmet,
yours the only truck sent that day from your firehouse way up
in the Bronx. You arrived just before the first tower fell.
This is going to be a long day, one of your buddies said.
Your face is lit by the flash of your disposable camera.
Behind are the dark holes of blown-out windows
in the buildings that still stand. Ahead are all the funerals
you’d attend, day after day after day, until you just couldn’t anymore.
The look in your eyes no longer the one I remember
from when we were boys, sitting at dusk on the field after track practice,
figuring out infinity and the universe, and what’s beyond it,
and what’s beyond that. In those eyes now I see the bodies of the jumpers,
and those stories you told before. The red-hot ember down the back
of your neck that left a scar. The time you were lost crawling
in a smoke-choked apartment, tangled up in a Christmas tree,
thinking you’d never get out.
Where you wiped the sweat off your face, left behind
are black smudges on your cheek and brow. Ashes. Maybe
a family photo from the desk of a worker at Cantor Fitzgerald,
a stack of memos from Aon, a napkin from Windows on the World,
a bit of a hijacker from Flight 11, or a trace of one of your 343 brothers.
You burned all your photos, your memories, one day, but couldn’t forget.
Your posts these days are always about accepting death, being ready
when it comes. You quote Jed McKenna, Eckhart Tolle, and Rumi.
You cling to the risk of a vertical climb in the Shawangunks,
live near the airport where you skydive, finding that thrill
you always sought, that release, that feeling of free fall.
Although I usually write poems based on my own memories and experiences, this photograph that my friend posted on Facebook was the inspiration for this poem. He was a New York City Firefighter, and experienced 9/11 first hand. He snapped the photo with a disposable camera he realized he had in his pocket. There are so many individual stories from that event, and this is just one of them. I know it affected him greatly, and my poem is meant to be a tribute to him and his fallen brothers in the FDNY. I think the photo captures so much, from the smudges on my friend’s face, to the thousand-yard stare in his eyes, to the little American flag he stuck in his helmet. I only hope my poem does the photo and him justice. I tried to capture the distance he travelled in those few hours of horror and the next several days of fruitless searching for survivors. The distance from our high school days of running track together as boys, trying to figure out the mysteries of life, to the shattered man he became in that one event, and what he’s done since to try to make sense of the world. In all my poems, I try to connect with or touch the heart of another person. I feel that poetry is the perfect medium for that, and I’m so grateful to have this unexpected chance to join together the visual impact of a photograph with the simple words of a poem.
Brian Duncan lives in Kendall Park, New Jersey with his wife, Margie, and two cats. He worked in a virology laboratory at Princeton University for many years and is now happily retired. He enjoys devoting his time to poetry, gardening, and hiking. He has poems out in the past year in ONE ART, Thimble, Passengers Journal, Whale Road Review, Elysium Review, and Sheila-Na-Gig.
