A shirt flies up, folds itself
Into a box. What is this?
An interruption. I try on a skirt
And it cinches. I am slendered
With the compliment. Khaki
Pants and pants and pants and
A wrinked shirt fly behind the couch.
The cardboard becomes Oklahoma, and
She leaves six days later to reclaim
A tornado born in 1962.
What the carpet? What the music
>From her corner of the room?
What the quiet and the quiet?
What our separate heat, mine
Of Philadelphia, hers of summer
In a place that warm all year?
I horror at the shelf. It bites
Back with dust and the grit
Of a place we didn't clean even
In September. The ceiling curdles,
The walls part and the boxes
Loaf-and-fish themselves.
I live with a gape-maw?
An mute window? Twice a door?
Accourding to Mytili Jagannathan:
Date: Thu, 20 May 1999 14:43:23 -0400 (EDT)
From: mytilij@dept.english.upenn.edu (Mytili Jagannathan)
Hi hubverse--I loved reading Hannah's poems for her departing
roommate--particularly the double-play on "condensing" as dewing and
collapsing, the surprise of trying to imagine a surface "licked with
sugar" and also the collapsing of time--the "yesterday lover" and the
"tomorrow car" against the oddly stretching, emptying present. Hannah,
what a vivid and wonderful sendoff gift!
--Mytili