FREDERICK FEIRSTEIN
257
Just miles from where my mother witnessed Hell.
"By smell," she says, "we're forced to witness this
Crematorium mixing bone and skin,
Spreading up here like metastasis ...
And your son watched the two planes hit, and your
Brother-in-law escaped from a top floor?
"So eat," she smiles like Mom, "You're getting thin."
And time and place collapse and the dust blows in.
As the days following 91I
I
limped on, I realized the poems I was
writing were developing into a sequence connecting the present disaster
with still earlier public and private traumas. I might say that precon–
sciously as well as consciously, I was symbolically making bridges
between this event and the fantasies it generated with split-off earlier
ones whose full meaning and emotional landscape were becoming
clearer as I wrote. From my own neuropsychoanalytic point of view, I
might also say that I was storing as metaphors and symbols my experi–
ence of 91I
I
in my brain's cortico-limbic system, with the aid of the self–
hypnotic effects of meter and rhyme to prevent long-term kindling of
neurons that result in Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Or to put it yet
another way: in the unconscious, time doesn't exist, and by using
metaphors, meter, and rhyme I was trying to place the experience of this
trauma and loss in the larger, more time-bound narrative of the poetic
sequence, thereby revising my life narrative as I had told it in earlier
poems.
One of the recurring themes of the sequence and earlier poems about
my life involves the loss of home-of my extended family and of my
bucolic life with my wife and young son. For instance, in 1994 I had
written "The House We Had to Sell":
This is the house we lived in, white as a bride.
Mozart is echoing the birds outside.
We're sitting at the table playing gin.
My son is laughing every time he wins
Because he's eight, because we're all in love,
Living the future we're still dreaming of.
Spring is in the mountains, green as Oz,
In the fresh-cut flowers in the crystal vase,
Mirroring the garden where the bees are thick.
Though everyone was dying, dead or sick,
These were our uncontaminated hours,
Like bottled water sipped by scissored flowers,
