Recording

The first person in recorded history struck by a comet slept on her couch across the road from the Comet Drive-In and the comet found her roof, her sadness, her knee, and woke her. Everything that hurts hurt before, she said. Showing at the drive-in, a documentary on tightrope-walking: a young man frustrated that his dream, the World Trade Center, was not yet built so he practiced for years in a meadow crossing intended sky, intent like a pillowcase sweetening him, no harm . . . Here let the towers go, let them write his crossing, cursive, back and forth his name steadying our tongues . . . Famous, overcoat floating down without him, the idea that we stand where we mean to stand, 1974, a distraction from my parents’ morning commute. At 59th Street they split. The poems I was writing were no longer poems of their divorce, my father’s sweeping gestures or his pain, the old Volkswagen and garden hose—all of that had washed from my poems and instead an imaginary family arrived in borrowed gardens, their son stillborn—even as I grew heavy with my own son I wrote poem after poem holding this imagined horror close.