PQR: Poems, Quotes, Readings

Selections from "Paragraphs from a Daybook"

by Marilyn Hacker

* * * * *

The topic was "love," and I thought about bound feet;
"how writers invent love with words" -- somewhere there is
a trove of "lotus-foot" poems. But how to girls complete
a thought without a word for "clitoris"?
-- thought there probably is a word meaning "what is cut,"
semantically akin to venom or shit
used when five-year-olds are maimed
with razor blades: that once, it's named.
We think about the things for which we've words;
words tell us what they think of
us, and the paragraph fast-forwards
to a trampled patch of bloody turf
or a kaleidoscope of bright imagination
in which it is possible to focus "love"
without envisaging some mutilation.

* * * * *

Daily she traverses the frontiers
health/sickness; sheltered/outcast; life/death;
doorways on dingy corridors,
sentences with pits dug underneath
them, the eloquence of absence or
presence (in from the street to wait for her).
Home, tired, she calls her friend,
gets the machine. The phone rings, and
it's not a patient with his viral load
and T-cell count come back
from the lab. Her friend is dead
at forty, of a heart attack.
Minutes ago, on tape, the alto voice
solicited her message with a joke.
Dinner tomorrow night? Or brunch? Your choice ...

* * * * *

A snapshot, after all, is a cliché:
so shatter and dazzle, oil on water. Spread like oil
in feather spirals, lapis lazuli,
viridian, crinkled foil,
anethyst, the heart of the crystal. Be
elsewhere, anywhere, synchronicity
irrelevant as a metronome.
Be out to lunch. Be at home
to irony, icons, iconoclasts.
The windows float, opaque
on late afternoon light that lasts and lasts
keeping an errant mind awake
through the arousal of an appetite
for love no remembers how to make
last, in the close proximity of night.

* * * * *

Cherry-ripe: dark sweet burlats, scarlet reverchons
firm-fleshed and tart in the mouth,
bigarreaux, peach-and-white napoléons
as the harvest moves north
from Provence to the banks of the Yonne
(they grow napoléons in Washington
State now). Before that, garriguettes,
from Perigord, in wooden punnets;
afterwards, peaches: yellow-fleshed, white,
moss-skinned ruby pêches de vigne.
The vendors cry out, "Taste," my appetite
does, too. Birdsong, from an unseen
sources on this street-island, too close for the trees:
it's a young woman with a tin basin
of plastic whistles moulded like canaries --

* * * * *

Hacker, Marilyn. Squares and Courtyards. NY: Norton, (c) 2000, pp. 70, 94, 100, 101.


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Last Update: September 22, 2002