On the news just a few hours ago, nearly eleven months after the horrific air strikes, local health officials have reported that the West Nile virus which has been churning through the swamps of Louisiana and Mississppi this summer, has just claimed its first DC victim. On the heels on that startling announcement just ten minutes ago I discovered a small dead crow on my window ledge, and having reported my find to the building manager, I am determined to finally record my vivid memories of September 11.

Alice Jane kissed me oh so go lightly on the cheek, and with a quick smooth long-tapering tap of the power button, shut off the minature TV nested snugly in the niche above the kitchen sink. It was 8:45 AM. She was running late, as usual, but she didn't mind a bit. Life was too short, she said, to sweat the minor details. Besides, she would always insist, the extra hour, and quite often two she diligently toiled at the opposite end of the day more than justified her few extra earshots of Katie Curic in the morning. As her dear mother once observed with more than a hint of disgust (and a distinction her equally dear husband now simply accepts as immutable fact), Alice Jane from her earliest days had always been a slow riser.

Bumps in age, worldly sophistication, and standing responsibilities in the marketplace had failed to adjust her own internal clock. There was no conciliation to notions of rising with the cock crow at the crack of dawn despite the astonishing orange and gold beams of sunlight gamboling off the tall structures gracing the avenue into our 3rd floor apartment windows and bed. Missing out altogether on these charming few minutes she preferred to squirm a little deeper into the cozy mound of quilts and pillows for an extra wink or two.

Amazingly, I had to admit that on those few occasions which for one reason or another she would not be able to grab that extra half hour or so of light snooze, her day would not rise above the asceptic and weary backwashes of snooze alarm interruptus. As a rule, she'd be zonked and sad-looking by the time she returned home, wearing the mask of someone five years older perhaps. Alice Jane had worked for the same firm for nearly two decades now. Periodic spirited reminders by the senior partner at Tobitus and Roy, who himself knew a few things about being on time and fresh at the starting gate since he owned a few racehorses himself, had effected little change in her morning routine. This much was plain. Her mornings would be leisurely and pure. Enough said.

The exception to this general rule of quiet lethargy where moping around the apartment in various states of undress and partial makeup, sipping java and snatching snippets of favored morning news personalities, straining to choose between first this rather fetching blouse or that somewhat questionable skirt, repeated a couple of times just to be sure she had mastered the quarrels of the closet and her own art form du jour would be those days when I spontaneously awaken with a torrent of well-percolated and over-mulched rhetorical speech springing from my tongue the moment my eyes roll open. It was then that her job, that nerve-pinching mind-stooping thankless job which kept her hovered over a desk crunching numbers and trying to materialize big mula out of thin air for a government consulting company always behind in its bills and always an adventure in its hallways, blossomed with meaning. Working for Julius Tobitus was her only escape...

My own reputation as an early riser is built on this particular quality, morning brightness in opposition to her own morning dullness. The booming oratory in which I rehashed the same old grievances still scarring the multitude of social equations I pondered with impatience and sought to resolve as if I were instead the exquisite genius of state and status rather than the mere rock garden and pooch poet I am confessed to be, was not a factor on this particular morning. Yet to remain resolutely hushed for too long a period often upsets my dear loving wife, who gauges my moods and her own relationship to them with the raw energy of my exhuberance. But on this bright morning I proclaimed a mere once or twice the boundless joy in redemption pouring in off the sun-spanked city beautifying the crisp autumnal airs of my favorite month I felt and insisted she share.

Always a special month in our calendar: our wedding anniversary was two days away, the High Holidays mixed in as usual, not that we were anything but wannabe Jews, and my own birthday, one I shared with T.S. Eliot popped up a few days toward the end of the month. And she, plus a full half of the fifty or so bureaucrats in her office, and several relatives on both sides of the family divide, hers and mine, would also be celebrating birthdays from mid-September to mid-October. And yes, for us, the Pope of Eruke was coming to town. Bob Dylan's "Love and Theft" was hitting stores on what would soon be known to Dylanistas everywhere as a sad and lonesome day, an unprecedented day in American history, a day of which the whole world quite literally would never forget. How we anticipated rushing down to Dupont Circle that evening to snag it off the shelf as a dedicated follower of fashion, Bob-styled! What I didn't know in these first few minutes of autumnal reverie was how quickly this cheerful, pirouetting mood was to change.

With Alice Jane now pleasantly groomed and heading off to the subway a short walk south, I returned to my rather uncomfortable desk to resume my own day in pajamas and slippers. Morning mail at my terminal was the lure, my own daily eye-opener when the poet's enfilading tongue was silent, and I had no other appointment to keep. But within minutes I was disturbed by the rumbling in my gut. I was hungry. No stranger to appetite, I ambled off into the kitchen, poking the TV switch as I passed it on the way to the refrigerator for a cup of yogurt. That's when heard the first of what would become a months-long drone of jostling but extraordinary expressions from the set. My world had changed instantly, in a twinkling of the cobra's eye. Familiar voices were ad libbing over the top of an absolutely astonishing visual. Two glass towers, the tallest in the world, one of them pierced by a cloud of heavy gray smoke. My mind went blank for just a few seconds as I processed the information. Riddled with uncertainty, the enigma of the event itself offered no facts except this steady fold of dark smoke peeling into the New York City sky.

Within a minute of my switching on the set, amid the clueless chattering of Curic and her crowd of equally shocked colleagues, as the camera continued to stare at the first tower, I saw a large passenger jet swoop down in a trajectory from the upper right-hand corner of the TV screen, disappear for a second or two, and then burst into a great ball of fire against the second tower. Even before the broadcasters had noted what had happened, I exclaimed out loud, "Oh my god, I have arrived."

It was a spontaneous thoughtless remark, one which immediately filled me with the churning black horror of self-incrimination, but of what? Catching my balance on the countertop as I reeled forward in sheer panic of what would happen next on the screen or off my tongue, my brain began processing many of the awkward implications these words were generating. America was obviously under attack. Having expected all through the Nineties this sort of air power muscle from the Middle East to fall upon what the notorious Michel de Nostradamus had called the New City, I mentally ransacked what I recalled of the stacks of prophetic utterances I had, much to my joy, begun to declare misguided, but then I recalled the previous WTC bombing aned other US targets, and suspected that I had been sleeping through an entire political sequnce like most of the American politik in that decade.As an uneducated man no diplomas hang from my wall, but having dedicated my unremarkable life to the world of letters in a compassionate attempt to comprehend this planet in crisis by extensive reading and acute observation in an everyman's effort to get a grip on the complex issues of right and might while sorting out the wheat from the chaff at both extremes of the political landscape as I found it, I pondered again my own struggle to rediscover the amazing grace of America's promising but often wretched past as well as what was in store for her future, hopefully with all the integrity I could muster, the same grace, the same awe for my country I'd experienced as a child, as a young boy scout of rank, as a staunch defender of patriotism and self-reliance in highschool, the glory days of belief before the callous schemes of religion and politics and personal failure had weathered my sails and flag. Had my early potential been completely wasted? Was there any success in store for me. Am I not America herself?

Here, screaming across the sky in a real time crisis, was a foul currency that would makes all things clear again I might have imagined. Perhaps this clarity is what I now hoped for myself, for my country, for my planet, a burning visceral desire for a moral and well-punctuated clarity, a desire that had somehow been articulated in a snap moment.

My own cowardice began scaling every distorted dimension of my simple and vunerable humanity, smothering all the uncompromising pretexts, which, given a lifelong dalliance in untold numbers of Judeo-Christian epistemology I had undertaken in vain as an attempt to register the voice of God, and finding only a legion of competing voices bearing down on the unnerving horror of doomsday and a place and time called Armaggeddon, I knew it might take another lifetime to unravel the strands and clusters of mysteries I had boldly presumed to understand given my current snail's pace and low station in making plain the obvious - the world is a dangerous place, and is no place for cowards of any rank.

But indeed, what on earth did it mean to blurt out - I had arrived - at the very moment I am witnessing the most tragic event of my national life? The asinine quality of the utterance appeared to make the thought absolutely meaningless, but the truth of the matter is that those six words are precisely what I knew as unalterable fact as I saw these flames hurling forth to engulf thousands of innocent people trapped in the buildings that would soon collapse into a heap of smoldering ashes.

Even now as I compose this statement, I cannot know the full significance of what I thought I was saying with those six words. It is obviously not an unusual fare for intellectual scavengers like myself, but I have been ruthlessly influenced by certain and uncertain glass darkly hints, inhospitable inklings, half-baked postulates, historical criminologies, and futuristic mythologies still growing into their wingz. And yes, I too, suspect I know why the caged bird sings. The usual suspects eat at me, but I have lost little in these attacks compared to many brave men and women and children, too. Plagued by rote feelings of grandeur tempered by grinding roll calls of intense inadequacies which revolve around my own failures as a middle-aged poet who has published little, partially paralyzed by self-hatred and notions of insurmountable sin and misunderstanding, of vague politics and less certain artistic ambitions. One thing I did learn within the next few hours: those chaps who'd obtusely refused with the wave of a hand and furrow of the brow to consider the peculiar languages and baggage of the world's competing religions...

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