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      March 25, 2014To My Husband, Who 33 Years Ago …Maryanne Hannan

      TO MY HUSBAND, WHO 33 YEARS AGO DIED AT THE AGE OF 33

      De mortuis, nihil nisi bonum
      Of you dead, I’ve spoken nothing
      but good, nodded at over-fond
      family memories, the favored first
      son who skipped school to sneak
      into the new museum. I’ve let
      strangers tell our girls how you fell
      forty feet taking a leak, behind
      the garage, at your graduation party,
      never dropping your grilled chicken
      leg. Such was not the nature
      of the man-to-be, yet these dull shards
      are now my own. What else of you
      can I offer our daughters, raised
      by another man? You are at our table
      always—in the gap, the sainted lost
      father, shrouded in respect, silence
      the price we pay for life. Was it wrong
      to let you slip into cliché, pallid
      memory? But how could it have been
      otherwise? You have been undoing now
      as long as you lived. Even the ink in your
      notebooks fades. Remember how you
      used to read “Dover Beach” and we would
      shudder with faux foreboding? Remember
      our pleasure when Emily said she didn’t
      know how the sun set? Neither did we
      then, nor did we much care. But oh, now
      to see it rise again, one ribbon at a time.

      from #41 - Fall 2013

      Maryanne Hannan

      “‘I live on Earth at present/ … I am not a thing—a noun./ I seem to be a verb,’ wrote Buckminster Fuller. When a person no longer inhabits the earth, they do become nouns, able to be defined by anyone with a memory. When I became a single parent, I felt intensely the impossibility of keeping alive, for our daughters, the dynamism that was their father. Over the years, stories have ossified, including my own, but there is still verb, an underlying stream of energy, left in memory. This poem finally enabled me to grapple with some of that pain.”

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