She said, “In the future,

you’ll find the one you lost,

but it will cost you.”

Now as I stand above a hole seventy feet deep,

looking down, I don’t see Pat.

When I call his name,

my voice is swallowed up by the roar of machines.

At first, that sound signified the possibility

of finding him

and made my heart beat faster,

but now it’s just the white noise

I hear in my nightmares

that always begins at the scene of a shooting

that occurred during a domestic disturbance

between a man and a woman in Queens

that left two teens bereft of a mother and father

and made them cling to one another much too tightly,

so that now the one left behind is frightened

by her utter loneliness

and drinks Irish whiskey at the pub

where her brother, Pat, used to hold up the bar,

promising the patrons he was going to quit drinking

one of these days

and to assorted laughter

call for another round of drinks,

knowing his sister would never let him

sink as low as he wanted to go.

He’d seen the fight. I hadn’t

but I was haunted too

although I tried not to show it,

especially to him.

That day when I got home

from basketball practice,

I found Pat cowering under the stairway

as I had so many times before

when our parents fought,

but this time, I knew something was different.

He wasn’t crying for a change.

“Are Mom and Dad fighting again?” I asked.

“They were,” he said, without a trace of emotion,

then he told me Dad had come into his room,

hugged him and said goodbye.

That’s when I knew something terrible had happened.

All the years since, I’d nursed him

through the rough times, the blue funks

and the highs that were too much

and always ended in a rush

of promises to stop drinking.

He worked construction, he’d say,

I wouldn’t catch him falling off some scaffolding

high above Manhattan,

even drunk he could maintain his balance.

The truth was he was often unemployed,

but I supported him.

I’d long since moved into our parents’ room,

but he stayed in his

across the hall from where they’d died,

surrounded by all his trophies from high school, comics

and posters taped and retaped to the walls.

The week before the attack,

he’d told me he was going back to work.

He’d stopped drinking for good

and I believed him, as I looked deeply into his eyes,

and saw a boy who having barely escaped

the inferno of family violence

would still finally perish in fire’s cold embrace.

DELUSION

I watched the Trade Center Towers

burning, then collapse

repeatedly on television,

until I could see them clearly

when I shut my eyes.

The blackened skies even blotted out my vision,

until I screamed and threw myself on the floor