Two Poems by Marilyn Hacker


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MHacker.gif (12680 bytes)
click book

Squares and Courtyards
by
Marilyn Hacker
DAYS OF 1994: ALEXANDRIANS

              for Edmund White



Lunch: as we close the twentieth century,
death, like a hanger-on or a wannabe
     sits with us at the cluttered bistro
     table, inflecting the conversation.

Elderly friends take lovers, rent studios,
plan trips to unpronounceable provinces.
     Fifty makes the ironic wager
     that his biographer will outlive him—

as may the erudite eighty-one-year-old
dandy with whom a squabble is simmering.
     His green-eyed architect companion
     died in the spring. He is frank about his

grief, as he savors spiced pumpkin soup, and a
sliced rare filet. We’ll see the next decade in
     or not. This one retains its flavor.
     "Her new book…" "…brilliant!" "She slept with…" "Really!"

Long arabesques of silver-tipped sentences
drift on the current of our two languages
     into the mist of late September
     mid-afternoon, where the dusk is curling
        

                                 *                                         
                                                                          
                                                                          
Just thirty-eight: her last chemotherapy
treatment’s the same day classes begin again.
     I went through it a year before she
     started; but hers was both breasts, and lymph nodes.

She’s always been a lax vegetarian.
Now she has cut out butter and cheese, and she
     never drank wine or beer. What else is
     there to eliminate? Tea and coffee…

(Our avocado salads are copious.)
It’s easier to talk about politics
     than to allow the terror that shares
     both of our bedrooms to find words. It made

the introduction; it’s an acquaintance we’ve
in common. Trading medical anecdotes
     helps out when conversation lapses.
     We don’t discuss Mitterrand and cancer.

Four months (I say) I’ll see her, see him again.
(I dream my life; I wake to contingencies.)
     Now I walk home along the river,
     into the wind, as the clouds break open.

 

INVOCATION

This is for Elsa, also known as Liz,
an ample-bodied gospel singer, five
discrete malignancies in one full breast.
This is for auburn Jacqueline, who is
celebrating fifty years alive,
one since she finished chemotherapy,
with fireworks on the fifteenth of July.
This is for June, whose words are lean and mean
as she is, elucidating our protest.
This is for Lucille, who shines a wide
beam for us with her dark cadences.
This is for long-limbed Maxine, astride
a horse like conscience. This is for Aline
who taught her lover to caress the scar.
This is for Eve, who thought of AZT
as hopeful poisons pumped into a vein.
This is for Nanette in the Midwest.
This is for Alicia, shaking back dark hair,
dancing one-breasted with the Sabbath bride.
This is for Judy on a mountainside,
plunging her gloved hands in a glistening hive.
Hilda, Patricia, Gaylord, Emilienne,
Tania, Eunice: this is for everyone
who marks the distance on a calendar
from what’s less likely each year to "recur."
Our saved-for-now lives are life sentences
—which we prefer to the alternative.


   

MARILYN HACKER is the author of nine books, including Presentation Piece, which  received the National Book Award in 1975, Winter Numbers, which received a Lambda Literary Award and the Lenore Marshall Award of the Academy of American Poets, both in 1995, and the verse novel, Love, Death and the Changing of the Seasons. Her Selected Poems was awarded the Poets’ Prize in 1996. Her  new book, Squares and Courtyards, will be published by W.W. Norton in January 2000. She lives in New York and Paris, and is now director of the M.A. program in English literature and creative writing at City College.

Click here to read more poems by Marilyn Hacker

ForPoetry