In her September 11 essay for Salon, Stacey D’Erasmo’s calm, metered prose dug a hole straight to my heart — and became a kind of poem. Just what I needed.

The title of her piece Flicked Aside By The Universe assured me this wasn’t going to be another polemical jaunt into Bushville. Of all that I’d had enough, after hours of CNN, and net hopping, writing for this site and phone talking — worry bead-like activities that haven’t done much to move me back to my familiar, everyday center.

Physically I’m in Seattle, but psychically, like the entirety of the country, I’m in Louisiana and Mississippi. Good friends have lost everything. Richard and Jonno never did get their cat back. And my 75-year-old mother, in California, still hasn’t been able to find out the fate of her last surviving friend from childhood. “Do you think they had flood insurance?” she asked me yesterday, as if remaining pragmatic would ward off grimmer fears.

There is no insurance — a sad fact — when order gets turned upside down, when we are “flicked aside by the universe,” as Stacey D’Erasmo writes:

Since Sept. 11, 2001, we have become accustomed to images of people in ragged groups walking through destroyed landscapes infinitely bigger than themselves, to images of people dragging what they can carry out of the ruins. We have also become accustomed to images of people falling from unimaginable heights and people clinging to trees or rooftops as water covers the world. To the dead floating, arms and legs spread, through the streets. They look so small. So mortal. Forked creatures, clinging to tree branches and chimneys, or stumbling out of the blast, faces white with ash.

There’s something very dreamlike about D’Erasmo’s essay. And I’m glad to know this former Village Voice editor has moved on to writing novels. She’ll be good at that. Caught in the cascade of images in her piece, I felt the recognition I register after a friend helps interpret one of my epic dreams. I could connect some of the blurry dots. Form vowels for the ineffable.

D’Erasmo continues:

The mythic order has smashed through the mortal one, breaking the frame. You can argue, if you like … whether the frame was ever whole to begin with, and whose fault it all is. But that’s not the mystery. In terms of the mortal order, we know what the story is: The cruel and the stupid are running the world. They would happily allow most of us, especially the poor, to drown or burn. It’s the mythic order, the continual intervention of the gigantic into daily life, that’s confounding. Even if the intelligent and the compassionate were to take over tomorrow, we would still be subject to its raw force. There’s been a breach.

Finally, I thought — after reading her piece for the second time — someone has gently, but with fierce objectivity, stated things clearly. With just enough metaphysics to soothe the part of myself that rallies, but always fails, to make sense of chaotic things.

It’s good, from time to time, to have the mystery addressed.