In the most
known photo
he looks just
like a
diver—
mid-descent, the
steel his sea—so
slowly he
seems to
fall, one
black leg
bent as in that
other kind of
dive (a can opener
I think they
call it), but
his a dive from the
burning
tower of his
life, from
Windows on the
World,
leaving this
world from the
ledge of
his assured
death.
What
the lesser known
photographs show
is the wind
stripping him
of his bright white shirt,
the talons of that
eagle-eyed
mid-morning air tearing
at his salmon tee,
and not really grace,
not really quietude
at all
but a flailing plunge,
a loss of control
in the last act
he could control,
which was to leap
from the relative safety
of that high floor, hot
as it was
and smoke-choked,
into the unsolid air,
which might be
like heaven
but fleet
and palpable
and there
for all of us to see
and—for those
who were
there—
to hear.
Gary J. Whitehead's poems recently appear or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Epoch, and The Massachusetts Review. His third book of poetry, A Glossary of Chickens, was chosen by Paul Muldoon for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets and published in 2013 by Princeton University Press. His work has been featured on Garrison Keillor's NPR program The Writer's Almanac and on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Guardian’s Poem of the Week. Whitehead has been the recipient of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize (The Massachusetts Review), a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and the Princeton University Distinguished Secondary School Teaching Award. A featured poet at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival and the Princeton Poetry Festival, he teaches English at Tenafly High School in New Jersey and lives in the Hudson valley of New York.