An airplane crashes into The World Trade Center where you’ve been working for only six days. 97th floor. We are told— incinerated. A friend calls to wake me— turn on the radio. I get through to Erika and ask her how she is. It’s not me, it’s Jon.

A memorial service, suicide attempts, rage, denial— grief’s harder to come by. Erika is still awash in memories, relives times with you where these things don’t happen. Innocence? No more. Sometimes I think my daughter’s a shell. A hard nut. Even a blood vessel about to burst. No weekend is again like any other. No movies. No theatre. No opera.

Three months after 9/11 Erika has a tree of life burned into her back with your birth and death dates. One side all branches, the other two leaves remaining, ready to fall. She knows from the moment it hits the news. No hope. Ever. Then, without warning on March 11th 2002 a knock comes at the door. 7:30a.m. Police! Come to the morgue. They’ve identified him.

4 ½ inches of your pelvis. We pick you up six weeks later from a mortuary. A length of cigar divided between Erika and your mother. I sit there with you in a paper bag next to me telling you how much I miss you. Tell you no one should ever have to go through this. You in two tiny urns, each in a box, both in a paper bag.

For Jon Grabowski, 1967-2001

to last the winter, glimpses of green bath-

robe when she shuffles down the hill

to her mailbox to collect more

rejection. People start laying bets,

perhaps she has a corpse hidden like,

what’s her name, was it Emily?

Maybe she’s taken a bad spell, some female kind

of thing. No, they have stuff to take for that

nowadays. She tucked away in October, some failure

in communication with her child, heart failure, but it keeps

on pumping bad through those tight veins. So tight they bulge

blue, blue like a Jaguar some boyfriend had forty years ago,

never let her drive it, too unstable he said. She wishes she

had driven it off a cliff, save the trouble now of figuring out an

out.

*

She squirrels antihistamines in her cheeks, hides them

under the mattress, forgets to take the medications that keep her

from being allergic to herself. She thinks about her child, seed

destroying her heart, who does not want to talk, see her, just

blame her for whatever erodes her own core. They don’t know details,

just that the woman is hibernating, saving herself the same way that forty-year-old blue Jaguar is on

display down at the Jag showroom. She has her own thoughts

about cats and the damage they do, thinks stepping into a cage with a tiger would be less painful than heartache she cannot stop.

*

She might as well be a bear. Come spring, come spring

permeates that slow mind. She might as well be a bear.

They prepare their offspring to be alone.

He wore those boxers with a matching shirt for eighty years, maybe more. He ate a Danish pastry every day at four and listened to the six o’clock news. I never liked tomato soup after we moved from that beach, pushing those islands back like stones that weighted like vomit, on its way up, when it makes sense to take away from.

Every time I dream about beaches I am four and save my baby brother from drowning. My mother says of course she saw him.