Marc Swan
Fault Line
On West Broadway, Wooster, Hudson, Varick
and Canal, I meet people
in beauty salons, cafés, boutiques,
at the newsstand. The talk
is the same -
where they were
what they saw, who they knew,
how the dust was so fine you had to wash
the walls top to bottom
again and again
and still particles were found
in creases, along the fine edges
of mirrors and on shelves.
‘It filled the time after
with a sense of something,”
one man says. Mostly they speak
of what they carry
six months later.
The buildings keep falling,
falling, and then the next night
the same,
or different buildings,
keep falling and falling.
Some hit hard.
Others lie suspended behind their eyes.
One young woman from Kazakhstan,
four countries east of Afghanistan,
I had to ask,
tells me she is in the buildings
when they fall.
She hasn’t hit bottom
yet, but feels closer each night.
In a churchyard beyond a fence
adorned with all those
good thoughts from around
the world - bits
of cloth, plastic bags and on one
limb a curtain, gray and torn,
hangs like a shroud.
Page(s) 191
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