Perhaps the memory begins with
eyes opening to yellow-blue-white daylight.

Perhaps the memory begins as
the towers glow in the window by the bed.

Perhaps the memory begins when
walking home in the rain the evening before.

Yes, perhaps it begins in that dusk.
Sudden rain. Gray-gold on the horizon down

Liberty, as I passed through Borders
in the World Trade Center to grab a Village

Voice and wait out the storm. Is that right?
Did I go through the Winter Garden from there?

Did I cross the street by Burger King
and go down to Rector to cross the highway?

No matter. The memory begins
there, in that twilight storm on September 10.

That twilight storm on September 10
broke the late-summer evening, cooled the city.

I got home. I can’t remember what
I did; maybe read the Voice, maybe drank beer.

Didn’t masturbate, right? Didn’t go
online, right? Did I sit in the gold wing chair

and read and think and write a line or
two? Watch the purple skies die over Jersey?

Hear cars hiss through the puddles down on
South End Avenue; the whoosh of the highway?

It was a mundane beautiful night.
So I remember. So I think I recall.

At some point Ana arrived home from
babysitting a rich kid. She was happy

to be home. We were happy to be
home. We’d returned to the city on Sunday,

September 9, after a month in
Malta, and weeks in Massachusetts. We came

home to her apartment, we came home
with her dog Chip, we came home—brought by my dad—

to pick up where we left off so fast:
Leaving college, going abroad, so much change

in mere months. Now back in NYC,
I needed to get a job. No sophomore year.

Dropped out. But that’s not where it begins.
The memory begins in that twilight storm

on September 10, and continues
until Ana came home, and we had dinner.

Maybe she brought us the rich people’s
leftovers. We kissed, we ate, maybe we fucked.

Or maybe not. I don’t remember.
We found ourselves in bed, watched the show Shipmates.

Laughed at the stupid shit on TV.
Got tired, brushed teeth, night rituals—Ana

put on face cream, I got naked. I 
was comfortable living with her, my first

girlfriend really, my first love, my first
time. We lay down, and at some point, the room was

dark and the towers were glowing bright
in the window, filling the window, the two,

north, south, overlapping, cross-sectioned
by the window, huge and quiet, lines of lights

(as all the stacked-up floors seemed at night).
Lines of squares of light, each little office seen

as a box of light. Visible blocks
away, the trace of someone there working late.

Light boxes and dark boxes in rows,
stacked 100 times or so in each tower,

until the buildings glowed and loomed as
fluorescent bodies over us, bodies of

bodies, bodies of light transcending
the window (we could only see the middle

floors from the bed), bodies breathing light
through the dark, inflating the gauzy curtains.

Filling our room with light as we slept.
Filling our home with living light as we slept.

That is where the memory begins.
And the memory continues after dreams

I will always forget because I
can never forget what happened when I woke.

MB 9/11/2021

Perhaps the memory begins with
eyes opening to yellow-blue-white daylight.

Perhaps the memory begins as
the towers glow in the window by the bed.