Two Poems by Marilyn Hacker
PN Review 103, May - June 1995
The Boy
Is it the boy in me who's looking out
the window, while someone across the street
mends a pillow-case, clouds shift, the gutterspout
pours rain, someone else lights a cigarette?
(Because he flinched, because he didn't whirl
around, face them, because he didn't hurl
the challenge back- 'Fascists?' -not 'Faggots' - 'Swine!'
he briefly wonders - if he were a girl…)
He writes a line. He crosses out a line.
I'll never be a man, but there's a boy
crossing out words: the rain, the linen-mender,
are all the homework he will do today.
The absence and the privilege of gender
confound in him, soprano, clumsy, frail.
Not neuter: neutral human and unmarked,
the younger brother in the fairytale
- except, boys shouted 'Jew' across the park
at him when he was coming home from school.
The book that he just read, about the war,
the partisans, is less a terrible
and thrilling story, more a warning, more
a code, and he must puzzle out the code.
He has short hair, a red sweatshirt. They know
something about him - that he should be proud
of? That's shameful if it shows?
That got you killed in 1942.
In his story, do the partisans
have sons? Have grandparents? Is he a Jew
more than he is a boy, who'll be a man
someday? Someone who'll never be a man
looks out the window at the rain he thought
might stop. He reads the sentence he began.
He writes down something that he crosses out.
Paris, 1994
Scars on Paper
An unwrapped icon, too potent to touch,
she freed my breasts from the camp Empire dress.
Now one of them's the absence of abreast
with a lost object's half-life, with as much
life as an anecdotal photograph:
me, Kim and Iva, all stripped to the waist,
hiking near Russian River on June first
'79. Iva's five-and-a-half.
While she was almost twenty, wearing black
T-shirts in DC, where we almost met.
you lay your palm, my love, on my flat chest.
In lines alive with what is not regret,
she takes her own path past, doesn't turn back.
Persistently, on paper, we exist.
Persistently, on paper, we exist.
You'd touch me if you could, but you're, in fact,
two thousand miles away. And my intact
body is eighteen months paper: the past
a fragile eighteen months' régime of trust
in slash-and-burn, in vitamin pills, backed
by no statistics. Each day I enact
survivor's rituals, blessing the crust
I tear from the warm loaf, blessing the hours
in which I didn't and in which I did
consider my own death. I am not yet
(statistically) a survivor. That
is sixty months. On paper, someone flowers
and flares alive -I knew her. But she's dead.
She flares alive. I knew her. But she's dead.
I flirted with her, might have been her friend,
but transatlantic schedules intervened.
She wrote a book about her Freedom Ride,
the canny elders whom she taught to read
-herself half-British, twenty-six, white-blonde,
with thirty years to live.
And I happened
to open up The Nation to that bad
news which I otherwise might not have known.
(Not breast cancer: cancer of the brain.)
Words take the absent friend away again.
Alone, I think: she called, alone, upon
her courage, tried in ways she'd not have wished
by pain and fear: her courage, extinguished.
The pain and fear some courage extinguished
at disaster's denouement come back
daily, banal. Is that blurred brownish-black
mole the next chapter? Was the ache enmeshed
between my chest and armpit when I washed
rogue cells' new claw, or just a muscle-ache?
I'm not yet desperate enough to take
comfort in being predeceased, share anguish
when the Harlem doctor, the Jewish dancer,
die of AIDS, the Boston seminary's
dean 'succumbs after brief illness' to cancer.
I like mossed slabs in country cemeteries
with wide-paced dates, candles in jars whose tallow
glows on summer evenings, desk-lamp yellow.
Glowing on summer evenings, a desk-lamp's yellow
moon light peruses notebooks, houseplants, texts,
while an ageing woman thinks of sex
in the present tense. Desire may follow,
urgent or elegant, cut raw or mellow
with wine and black ripe figs: a proof, the next
course; a simple question; the complex
response; a burning sweetness she will swallow.
The opening mind is sexual and ready
for embrace, incarnate in its prime.
Rippling concentrically from summer's gold
disc, desire's iris expands, steady
with blood-beat. Each time implies the next time.
the ageing woman hopes she will grow old.
The ageing woman hopes she will grow old.
A younger woman has a dazzling vision
of bleeding wrists, her own: the clean incisions
suddenly there, two open mouths. They told
their speechless secrets, witnesses not called
to what occurred with as little volition
of hers as these wounds.
Passionate precision
of scars, in flesh, in spirit. I'm enrolled
by mine in ranks where now I'm 'being brave'
if I take off my shirt in a hot crowd
marching for Women's Healthcare or Dyke Pride.
Her bravery counters the kitchen knives'
insinuation that the scars be made.
With or despite our scars, we stay alive.
'With or despite our scars, we stayed alive
until the Contras or the Government
or rebel troops came, until we were sent
to relocation camps, until the archives
burned, until we dug the ditch, the grave
beside the aspen grove where adolescent
boys used to cut class, until we ,vent
to the precinct, eager to behave
like citizens.'
I count my hours and days,
finger for luck the word-scarred table which
is not my witness, shares all innocent
objects' silence: a tin plate, a basement
door, a spade, barbed wire, a ring of keys,
an unwrapped icon, too potent to touch.
Ohio/Paris, 1994
Marilyn Hacker is the author of fourteen books of poems, including Blazons (Carcanet 2019), A Stranger’s Mirror (Norton, 2015) and Names (Norton, 2010), and an essay collection, Unauthorized Voices ( Michigan, 2010). Her sixteen translations of French and Francophone poets include Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s A Handful of Blue Earth (Liverpool, 2017) and Emmanuel Moses’ Preludes and Fugues (Oberlin, 2016). She received the 2009 American PEN Award for poetry in translation for Marie Etienne’s King of a Hundred Horsemen, the 2010 PEN Voelcker Award and the international Argana Prize for Poetry from the Beit as-Sh’ir/ House of Poetry in Morocco in 2011. She lives in Paris.
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