Transmutation Ode 

 The imagined Rapture in his novel
was, the author said, an allegory for 9/11
 
but focused not on grief or revenge,
since even after all those people disappeared
 
not much was different on Earth, the pessimists
still pessimistic, the repentants still wearing
 
special outfits while the bereft distracted themselves
with booze or sex. Maybe the law of conservation
 
of matter applies not just to disaster
but material things, and nothing’s ever lost, just
 
changed in form, our loved ones in Heaven
still wearing the clothes they vanished in,
 
so distracted by whatever made them happiest
in life that they hardly miss us. The actual planes, seen
 
by thousands, seemed to grow as they approached
the Towers, though that was an illusion.
 
The body keeps changing, not transmutation
or transfiguration but growth followed by
 
the breakdown of tissues and cells, the formerly
ripe parts drooping because it’s time. Most
 
of the bodies of those killed on 9/11 were changed
into particles small enough to be inhaled, which
 
they were. In twenty or fifty years, probably no one
will recognize that novel’s allusions,
 
artists long since having stopped trying to find
new ways to retell that story, a newer tragedy
 
by then having crowded out
the dimly recalled ones. We like to say
 
those who disappeared aren’t really
gone as long as we remember them. There
 
remain so many emblems, not only
the fragile notices hung all over the city
 
those first days, some taken down and laminated
or projected onto the walls of the new museum
 
but all the possessions of the dead, some
also displayed, the ordinary jacket and gloves
 
important not because they are dust-covered
or burned or physically different in any way
 
but because they aren’t, which is the point,
since our seeing changes them,
 
reveals they have been changed.