Claudia Keelan, from "Everybody's Autobiography"

8. 
My father died on July 21st, 2001, and on September 11, 2001,
eleven boys in four airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center,
the Pentagon, and into a field in Pennsylvania,
killing themselves and thousands of people.

This has something to do with my father, with oil, with me.
My government and with you.

Since my father’s death, I’ve slowly begun waking to my childhood.
It’s mostly full of other people’s words, as is time in general, the specific
a rare event, relying as it does upon an individual member being awake.

I’m waking to my childhood in my own child’s life,
the driving he loves on video games, a version of the driving I loved, asleep
in the backseat. May all his crashing be virtual.

In remembering is re-membering.
Heart and mind, body and soul, time and space, father and daughter,
we are separate; we are attached.

The mind knows this when the heart pulses freely,
dependent on its own muscle.
The soul itself is a muscle, both housed
and independent of its own body.

I’m aware of its contraction now, in the arc it’s making outside me
as it follows the automobile’s whine, which is a pulse too, surrounding
each moment of modern life.

Time is eternal in space. Trapped radio waves prove it,
as does my dead father’s DNA wound through me.

Heaven, then, spirals in a dragon fly’s hovering, look, just now,
and in its vanishing.



Claudia Keelan

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