September 11, 2002. At 6 a.m. strangers gather at the Jaya Yoga center in South Brooklyn.  Paper printouts declare that this is a “sacred space,” and that yoga is free today.  A petite blonde yogi with muscular shoulders leads the barefoot assembly through various contortions.  In the toxic world of Don DeLillo’s White Noise a comforting mother named Babette gives classes in standing.  New Yorkers pay to remember what it is to breathe.  For many this yoga class is their sacred space: the deep lunges and vegan diets are their offering.  It’s not a bad place to start. You slip into your skin, you think of how much blood and meat and sinew you are, and you sigh.  The subway graffiti from last September has not been scrubbed away: “You are alive.” Ah.  That’s right, alive, in the blue hour, breathing.  Across the East River in Chinatown, the old ladies and men are practicing tai chi. They do this every morning, then mah jong, later more tai chi, always gossip.  Chinatown neighbors the former site of the World Trade Center, so last year the Chinese put on surgical masks to stretch.  The air was too much—a horrifying conflagration of hair and bones, carpet and computers.  A year later and the elderly stretch without masks.  Their swan movements soothe the eye—the way a grandfather flutters his hands about his body, as though to wake it; the way a grandmother raises her leg onto a fence and sweeps her body toward it.

It’s September 11.  Last weekend men blew the shofar for the Jewish New Year.  Tomorrow, in Little Italy, the feast of San Genarro begins; streamers are hung across the streets. It’s the “International Day Against Video Surveillance.” New Yorkers are encouraged to moon the monitoring device at the ATM, or perform Othello under the electronic eyes of the arch in Washington Square Park.  In the Bronx a pair of white pines are planted, for new life.

Everyone is waking, putting on skin.  We wake soft, just returned from lands of sleep, and the city is here—annealed in the night.  We wake hungry, every one of the eight million aching for God. Some are holding the tent poles that keep the sky from falling.  They say, “Lord, Open my lips and my mouth shall declare your praise.”

And now the sun is up.

How must we praise? This is a day of absurd and endless death.  This is Pandora’s Box and Babel falling, this is weeping, this is widow making, this is us answering killing with more.  This is also someone’s birthday, a workday and a Wednesday. How must we praise?

Bagpipers rose before dawn to stream songs from the outer boroughs to the mass grave in Downtown.  All day long there is music— the more guttural the better—we need cellos, and bagpipes and gruff baritones.  Our words seem silly and small.  Last year, and a day, a cellist set up camp in front of the charred remains and began to play. The beau geste of his bow and rosin and string! The horror that God allows.

There are cops in the subway today.

A middle-aged woman with a square jaw conducts an animated conversation with a dog on 7th St. She speaks for both of them.  Miu Miu shoes in SoHo is closed “in remembrance” until noon.  A bistro in Nolita requests that patrons keep silence during their meals.  There are flag ribbons hung around trees and lampposts and women’s waists.  A bakery has a passage from Aeschylus in the window.  Pictures of eagles eating turbaned men are plastered to a dumpster.  The sky is blue.  The Dominicans in Union Square Park are 11 days deep in their thirty-day fast.  The crowds in Washington Square Park kept an all-night vigil for peace, crying mercy and calling out names.

The names echo all day.

In the great gothic cave that is St. John the Divine they chant them.

Tommy Sullivan. Aisha Harris. Thierry Saada. Alysia Basmijan. Milagros Hromade. Danny Correa. Joseph Maloney. Monica Goldstein. David Lee. Margaret Seliger. Salvatore Gitto.

In the seven-story pit of the former WTC, family members of the dead stand through an alphabetized litany, waiting to hear the name that was salt, was savor and is always in their mouths.

Twenty-seven thousand roses are donated for them to carry.

Across the street is St. Paul’s Church, where George Washington prayed after being named President.  A Mennonite Choir is singing “Just As I Am” out front.  The iron fence surrounding the church is crammed with letters, t-shirts, banners, and photographs.  The memorial began one year ago like this: off-duty firefighters who were called to the scene had to change out of their plain clothes or “civvies” and into their workwear. They hung their street boots on the fence posts.  At the end of the day many boots were still there, the men and women who wore them dead. The memorial grew from the ground to these boots.

One man has written, “Kill all Islam and their traitourous [sic] left-wing America hating asshole allies and sympathizers,” over which another wrote “NO.” Mostly, the outpouring is hopeful and solemn. Junior high students in Matsue, Japan have sent 7,000 folded cranes.  Virginia Wesleyan College sent a banner, as did the Police and Fire departments of Shawnee, Kansas, the Carolina Square and Round Dancers, and the elementary school students of Alberta, Canada.  Members of the Church of the Holy Comforter, from Augusta, Georgia were here for months last year, volunteering as part of the 24-hour food service for rescue workers.  Their old sign promising “Good Grits, Good Hugs, We Love To Serve You,” is in the sanctuary with a note from Reverend Cindy, “I loved being with you more than you’ll know. What an honor to serve y’all.”  St. Serbian Orthodox sends “Christ is risen! And no one remains in the tomb!” Girl scouts in Ohio have made an American flag out of their handprints. The “Ladies Learning to Lean,” from Memphis, Tennessee painted a banner crowded with Psalms and Scripture.  The old words of Romans 8 and Isaiah 61 are new when seen here. They are so wild.  And there is Matthew 11, “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest.”  Prayer is made valid here.  What would happen if we held each other like this every day?

Across from the church it’s business. Vendors are selling snowglobes of the old skyline and tapes of that stupid Lee Greenwood song.  A man with a placard for “New York Dolls! XXX!” is passing out flyers.

I go to the women’s high school in Midtown where I teach. My students are like the people of this city; nearly half are foreign born.  They grew up speaking Creole, Swahili, Spanish.  I have been told, “three in four suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.” The tests were conducted after last year’s terrorist attacks, but the trauma, for too many, is older and nearer.  We are reading a heavy-handed novel and their short essays on metaphor trouble me. They are not analytical, they are confessional, and the confessions are too much. Several students write to say that they identify with Pecola, the protagonist, because they have also been raped.  We don’t talk about terrorism, then.  But it’s literature, so death is everywhere. This week we read these lines from William Carlos Williams:

Sorrow is my own yard

Where the new grass

flames as it has flamed

often before but not

with the cold fire

that closes round me this year.

Thirtyfive years

I lived with my husband.

The words belong to a widow in Staten Island. A mother in Britain whose son traded on the 79th floor could read W.H. Auden properly:

Stop all the clocks,

cut off the telephone.

We read the words as best we can.  We learn literary terms, too. For euphemism I suggest “collateral damage,” and they concur.

At school the nuns pass out flag pins with a tiny cross tacked on the corner.  They are called “cross-flags” and are a popular accessory.  They come with a dribbly prayer “for Our Leaders,” that ends, “May they follow Your will to direct our nation in the paths of peace and safety.”

South Korean, German, Mexican, Swiss and Israeli citizens were among those who died on September 11, 2001. There is “a cell” in Buffalo. The joke is old now: if we attack all of the states that harbor terrorists, will we begin with Texas?

And the unsafe story of Abraham: how many does it render sleepless?

And the trope about New York, that “they forget death in New York.”  But these days death keeps butting into conversation.  You’re eating a turkey and rye and she’s eating a cheese slice and there It is.  People want to talk about how their cousin’s boyfriend dashed out in time, or how their neighbor’s sister felt ill that morning and called in sick.  In Midtown, where workers are stacked like matches, there are evacuation plans in the event of a bomb.  Some involve jumping in the river.  A friend of mine who lived in this neighborhood last year and has since moved sends me a note.  She says she’s been missing the city, “I have dreams about supertall buildings.  They are skinny and swaying and I descend between them on a swing . . . I accidentally drop textbooks filled with photographs of clouds and they spiral down through the miles of sky and glass and my stomach turns.”  I imagine her photos as I walk out the door, littering the ground, and I’m glad.

In the evening people gather at parks and libraries and houses of prayer.  (They also, of course, watch TV, work the nightshift, eat empanadas, practice the flute, kiss).  On the steps of the Brooklyn Public Library, Galway Kinnell reads his poem, “When The Towers Fell.”  He uses his words like “miasmic” and “astringent” to describe the air. He says,

Some died while calling home to say they were O.K . . . .

Some broke windows and leaned out and waited for rescue. . .

Some leapt hand in hand,

the elasticity in last bits of love-time letting—I wish I could say—their vertical streaks down the sky happen more lightly.

Other poets read in other languages.  Overhead four jets circle low.  Higher in the sky a single kite is flying.  When the reading is finished the crowd of listeners fold their metal chairs and head across the street to Prospect Park, a 150-acre stretch of green.   Two women are at the stoplight before the entrance to the park, passing out long white candles in ceramic holders.  The movement is unchoreographed and absolutely right.

The summer’s heat breaks today.  

The air is cool and crisp and the light is slant and leaving.  The candlelight vigil is in the center of the park, so from every direction you see them come streaming: whole families, men on bicycles, lesbian couples, swaggering seventeen-year old boys, Orthodox Jewish women with dark skirts and dark tights.  Watching the ragtag procession, something catches in my throat. This is the most beautiful sight of the day.  I join the stream.  I’m riding my bicycle without hands, a practice from childhood.  This weightless grace is my antidote to gravity.  I imagine that we could fly, or climb, like the procession in Flannery O’Connor’s “Revelation,” with the “battalions of freaks and lunatics,” and the “companies of white trash” made clean for the first time.

Right now the night does not seem tragic or angry, so much as unbearably tender.  In some ways it is the sort of night you wish for a city—a good gathering in a public space.  And there is something festive, too.  Fathers swing their babies to the music of a symphony and extra hot dog salesmen are out on the corner.

”Project Liberty” mental health workers are walking the grounds, handing out bottles of water and advice about coping.  The symphony ends and a youth choir begins with “The Star Spangled Banner.”  A rippling flag is flashed across giant TV screens and the atmosphere changes again.  Why do we keep singing about the “rockets red glare?”

At its best the public rituals of this night are led by those who need no prodding to remember “the events of last September.”  At its best this is a night of silence or music, of art, of awe and of prayer. But in Prospect Park and all over New York the music stops and the image of President Bush is projected from Ellis Island.  He speaks of “a world of liberty and security,” and, as always, of criminals hiding in caves.  He says, “our deepest national conviction is that every life is precious,” but continues, promising, “what our enemies have begun we will finish.”  He turns these cello strains into a snare drum’s roll and a bugle call.  Those of us who sit under the moon, under the sky, those who cry in public places, are now being told to stand at attention.  He appeals to our emotions, and they are stripped bare.

The weightlessness turns to concrete and steel, heavy as the innards of the towers that fell.  

Last year people papered this city with the plea that “our grief is not a cry for war.” They opened their veins to give blood.  They met in parks to pray. Fifty years ago, during an Air Raid Drill, some New Yorkers sat outside, like holy fools. They said, “We do not have faith in God if we depend on the Atom Bomb.”

The day begins with Zechariah, who was mute, then learned to praise. The day ends with Simeon and the confessed heap of our failings.

”Who do you say that I am?” we are asked.

And we ask, “How then shall we live?”

It is late.  The TV’s are turned off; the speeches are made. Some are still holding up the sky.  Like Simeon they ask to take leave, into sleep and into death.  ”Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit.”

Into your hands.

Mia Nussbaum graduated from the Program of Liberal Studies at the University of Notre Dame in 2001. She lives and works in New York City.