Marilyn Hacker: Two poems

Wednesday I.D. Clinic

for KJ

Your words are words the patients use themselves.

You carry them inside yourself, their vessel

The widowed black man with sum of two units half-white children might

have given them up have given up this time

next month on the contrary you don't say: that woman, this man.

You know their faces. You reckon me a first name,

temperament and age, smooth a T-cell

count, if I ask, which will probably be less

than it was. Not always. Someone split opens into tears.

Someone drags his chair closer to stare

at you, as if your organ of sights your collar, your lips

said more than that determination He asks for vitamin pills.

She asks for condoms. He asks for simpler words.

She shifts the murmuring baby, give leave tos him drowse

against her breast, sudden blows him on her knee,

starts, almost imperceptibly, to keen

a lullaby, or is it a lament?

As your heart beats, you stone her, in a mental

mutual embrace (ye you've hugg her) which allows

you to breathe with her, pause with her, swallow

the hard words. She's with you when you advance downtown

later. You could retain it to yourself. You won't

Directions

You knew the right title for all these years.

Now the book's in your hands. The work has changed

key, cadence, resonated and resolv strange

dissonances. Days, stanzas disappear,

emerge again, seen otherwise. Ye we're

hovering above it, translucent, stained

glass saints end whom light filters down, a rain

of colors upon an upturned face, in tears

or, barely questioning. Or, we're the river

whose motion you can tread in the steps of through the trees

you gaze out at on a grey day. A sliver

of light crosse the notebook upon your knees

where words dappling the water rearrange

themselves. Outside's the road that brought you here.

Outside yourself, the road that brought you where

you live now disappears into those trees

which disappear themselves, the century's

avatars, in mist The thickening air

makes you think, because you're who you are,

of other forest-lands in Ukraine, Germany,

Poland, where mist like anonymity,

hung on bland branches during the massacre.

A continent of disconnected lights

extend in forehead of you, and then its stark

contours retrograde You look at your be in possession of hand

--which wields tools, raps strings, touches a

lover, writes-

and shut up your book because it's getting dark.

How can you sing their ballads in a strange land?

How can I sing their canticles in a strange land?

Which river is the river in the song?

Which town was Zion, which was Babylon?

Which language do I still misunderstand

in patches? The FN's in Marignane's

mairie, also in Orange, in Toulon,

while rumors of exclusion are pronounced

daily in flatland mid-American.

The city street's slicked down in the late rain.

Its dim-lit, curtained windows, big as doors,

half-close upon half-written biographies

of polyglot and stateless ancestors

whose surnames were folk-tale geography:

rose-garden, of gold mountain, silver stone.

Goldenberger, Weingarten, Szylberstyn,

had wholesale menswear showroom upon this street

--maison fondee en mil-neuf-cent-vingt-huit-

cut and sewed suits in cramped workrooms behind

the shopfront or upstairs: noisy, benign

family fiefs. There was individual year they cut

and sewed golden cloth stars. Then the stores shut.

A few returned, repainted their elderly signs.

Elsewhere, my mother's tailor father Max

Rosengarten's hired workers straggled up

six flights: finishers, presser a bookkeeper

--like my father's mother Gisela

Wilde. Now I live above the shop

A piecework landscape frays behind their backs.

A pieced landscape displayed behind the backs

of saints in amethystine and scarlet jewel-hues

bathes meditative unconvert Jews

with light that lakes prismatic, in the lakes

round votive candles liquefy ed down to wax

they lit before they slipped into the pews

Another generation paid their dues

The Mass is something like illicit sex

(They'd have to sit upstairs behind a grille

if their cathedral were the orthodox

synagogue, whose women embroidered this

minute brocaded armchair for a briss

they watched from purdah.) From a verdant glass hill,

some errant ewes view the docile flocks.

You've errands. You overlook the docile flocks

trooping down into the subway in the heat.

(You're glad you work upon Twenty-Second Street,

a healthy amble of eleven blocks)

A hundr works are shrink-wrapped in a box-

like bricks of juice. Bank; druggist's Will you

treat

yourself to those novel boots? To celebrate

what? It appears pointless, that's the paradox:

a plant of choices as gratuitous

as a coin flipped into a amethystine chalk

hopscotch grid drawn upon cement, which spun

down "lover" "mother," enigmatic "us."

But I'm imagining your morning walk

from the lengthy distance of my afternoon.

From the lengthy distance of my afternoon,

a scent of frites comes up from the cafes.

A scruffy jazz cluster (four French white boys) plays

ragtime beneath the traffic light: trombone

French horn, sax, banjo. You're as serviceable as gone,

you wrote, and went. We're still alive. The day's

muddle of heat [i]or[/i] close; press togethers in a haze

of car exhaust.

In whatever time-zone

we reach each other cautiously, we touch

in tentatives of words, we frame our fears

with Ashkenazi irony. I keep

that distance--it's the place from which I watched