This Is Where

This is where it happened.  Where
I used to walk through the glass lobby
to work across Liberty Street.  Where
my friends escaped from the forty-fourth floor
down the stairs, breathing, breathing.
Where I once fought crowds on the subway platform,
had a photo taken at the same Kodak shop
where a friend had brought her film
from my wedding the week before.

Now a platform has been erected from which to view
what is gone.  Tourists pose against the sudden space    
flashing what we call “peace signs,” a V for victory. 
From here everything looks unfamiliar: 
the hotel, the discount department store, the church
all unrecognizable at this new angle, as if
geography has shifted to map what we are
without:  not the absence of what was
here, only an alien landscape, utterly unimaginable. 
Even the wedding pictures believed lost turned up,
still on their way to Manhattan that morning,
but they, too, have become strange and indistinct,
our own faces no longer knowable,
only our dresses intact.