Three Poems by Marilyn Hacker
PN Review 145, May - June 2002
Troisième sans ascenseur
A square of sunlight on the study wall
is worth her notice, so she makes a note.
Various printings of the books she wrote
fill shelves encroaching on the narrow hall
but not her work-room: that's spare, practical.
Six dictionaries, Bartlett's Familiar Quot-
ations, typewriter. Seventy-eight,
she's a technician of grammatical
rules in three languages, and that will do.
The desk is a librarian's, blonde oak.
The angle of her chair, turned toward a stack
of fine-lined blank notebooks, leads her eyes to
the bare wall blazing with its pristine one
tall north window, framing the winter sun.
If you are engaged by what you read on our free Substack, do consider subscribing to the magazine. Like all independent literary magazines, PN Review relies on paid subscribers to survive. Subscribers have access to our entire fifty year archive, plus six new issues per year, in print and digital form.
Fable
for M.P.
A fox, a badger, any provident creature
clever and agile, knowing how to get through a long
winter and a wet spring, you tapped your foot to the song
Louis Armstrong sang, retrieved on the loudspeaker,
and read the TLS, and sipped a strong
mug of French Roast, while outside the café
a fine cold rain inundated upper Broadway
across which your friend ran back and forth, being
vague and distracted and distraught and wrong
about how long precisely it would take
to triage, dismantle, wrap, pack, box and stack
a third of a life in one rain-curtained building:
a wild duck's moulting wings flapped in distress
between departure and the TLS.
Respite in a Minor Key
I would like an unending stretch of drizzly
weekday afternoons, in a moulting season:
no where else to go but across the street for
bread, and the paper.
Later, faces, voices across a table,
or an autumn fricassee, cèpes and shallots,
sipping Gigondas as I dice and hum to
Charpentier's vespers.
No one's waiting for me across an ocean.
What I can't understand or change is distant.
War is a debate, or at worst, a headlined
nightmare. But waking
it will be there still, and one morning closer
to my implication in what I never
chose, elected, as my natal sky rains down
civilian ashes.
These poems by Marilyn Hacker are taken from PN Review 145, May - June 2002. Further contributions from Hacker, including the rest of her poems in this issue, are available in the archive to paying subscribers, as well as more poetry, features, reviews and reports from across the back catalogue.