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for September 11, 2001
Even a woman who's lost her breast
forgets the malefic
dark gnarl that held her body under threat
of knife or death
unlucky meeting of blade and flesh
fire and lead
spore and breath
We are all fat after the fact
We are rolling in our flesh before the mirror
Fact is, we were born into this body
American and even the giving-way of glass and skin
isn't enough to shut down the machinery
We still build on sacred graves
We still hang our laundry on the line
our threadbare habits, histories without which
What would our days slip into?
nothing
to wear but the new crisp frock
of absence
©2001, Marj Hahne
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Piano, violin inconsolable
keys, strings like long-faced
skyscrapers : these prepare me
for the winter : December 2001 : mass
of ash, traces of human trajectory, smoked
postscripts blotting out a briefer sun.
December 1965 : a family's first apartment
on Schaefer Street in Brooklyn : my first New York winter :
the disaster of my birth two seasons past (six weeks in a hot
hospital box like a preborn bird thrashing in its amnion) : fast
forward 36 years : my second first winter in the city :
a musty one-bedroom sublet on the Upper West Side : and I
again have no need for language : but for long
howling vowels, the hundred-plus words in this poem, my own
dumb limbs flailing.
©2001, Marj Hahne
Until she moved to New York last year, Marj Hahne was our Philadelphia/South Jersey/Delaware Museletter correspondent. More of her poems are online, “Memorizable” at La Petite Zine.
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