Marilyn Hacker

For Hayden Carruth Thought thrusts up, homely as a hyacinth wrapped in its bulb like a root-vegetable, a ninth-month belly, where the green indelible pattern's inscribed into the labyrinth. Thrust into light, it's air's inhabitant with light and air as food and drink. A hyacinth, tumescent pink on the low wooden Mexican chest confronts the wintry dusk with informed self-interest. Leaf-spears extravagantly ask what idea, still gnarled up in a knot of ganglions, will break through the husk shaped at last, recognizable as thought. • Trace, on a city map, trajectories of partially-forgotten words along the river's arteries, volatile substance of a sentient world. Mauve heather crowds the window-grill. The light lingers a little later, with a slight vernal inflection. In a moon-glazed vase bloom yellow freesias, like some rainy day's brook-bank, in someone else's memory. Small whirlpools of perception widen, ring an infant's numinous discoveries of syllables for animals, toys, trees: a Lab's thick coat, the dusty birds in Claremont Park each tardy urban spring, a stuffed pink leather horse with button eyes. • A question-mark in yellow overalls, I could read. I was three. I slept with that pink horse. My one doll's name was V. J. She'd been given to me to celebrate the Victory over Japan, that is to say, the Bomb I'd spend my schooldays taking shelter from. I couldn't tie my shoes. But Reddy the fox, Tootle the engine who jumped off the tracks, spelled me their stories on my mother's lap despite weak eyes and poor small-motor skills. My grandparents were dead: not in pogroms, not in the camps—of strokes and heart attacks, merely immigrants, not deportees. "When you die, does everything just stop?" • I'm four, in itchy woolen leggings, the day that I can't recognize the man down at the park entrance, waving, as my father. He has ten more years to live, that spring. Dapper and balding he walks toward me; then I run toward him, calling him, flustered by my flawed vision. Underfoot, the maples' green- winged seeds splay on mica-specked octagons. His round face, thin nose, moustache silvered gray at thirty-eight look (I think now) Hungarian. I like his wood-smell of two packs a day as he swings me up to his shoulder and I say, things look blurry far away —one Saturday, two years after the war.

for Lewis Ellingham The laughing soldiers fought to their defeat . . . James Fenton, “In a Notebook” White decorators interested in Art, Black file clerks with theatrical ambitions, kids making pharmaceutical revisions in journals Comp. instructors urged they start, the part-Cherokee teenage genius (maybe), the secretary who hung out with fairies, the copywriter wanting to know, where is my husband? the soprano with the baby, all drank draft beer or lethal sweet Manhattans or improvised concoctions with tequila in summer when, from Third Street, we could feel a night breeze waft in whose fragrances were Latin. The place was run by Polish refugees: squat Margie, gaunt Speedy (whose sobriquet transliterated what?). He’d brought his play from Łódź. After a while, we guessed Margie’s illiteracy was why he cashed checks and she perched near the threshold to ban pros, the underage, the fugitive, and those arrayed impertinently to their sex. The bar was talk and cruising; in the back room, we danced: Martha and the Vandellas, Smokey and the Miracles, while sellers and buyers changed crisp tens for smoke and smack. Some came in after work, some after supper, plumage replenished to meet who knew who. Behind the bar, Margie dished up beef stew. On weeknights, you could always find an upper to speed you to your desk, and drink till four. Loosened by booze, we drifted, on the ripples of Motown, home in new couples, or triples, were back at dusk, with IDs, at the door. Bill was my roommate, Russell drank with me, although they were a dozen years my seniors. I walked off with the eighteen-year-old genius —an Older Woman, barely twenty-three. Link was new as Rimbaud, and better looking, North Beach bar paideon of doomed Jack Spicer, like Russell, our two-meter artificer, a Corvo whose ecclesia was cooking. Bill and Russell were painters. Bill had been a monk in Kyoto. Stoned, we sketched together, till he discovered poppers and black leather and Zen consented to new discipline. We shared my Sixth Street flat with a morose cat, an arch cat, and pot plants we pruned daily. His boyfriend had left him for an Israeli dancer; my husband was on Mykonos. Russell loved Harold, who was Black and bad, and lavished on him dinners “meant for men” like Escoffier and Brillat-Savarin. Staunch blond Dora made rice. When she had tucked in the twins, six flights of tenement stairs they’d descend, elevenish, and stroll down Third Street, desultory night patrol gone mauve and green under the virulent streetlights, to the bar, where Bill and I (if we’d not come to dinner), Link, and Lew, and Betty had already had a few. One sweat-soaked night in pitiless July, wedged on booth benches of cracked Naugahyde, we planned a literary magazine where North Beach met the Lower East Side Scene. We could have titled it When Worlds Collide. Dora was gone, “In case the children wake up.” Link lightly had decamped with someone else (the German engineer? Or was he Bill’s?). Russell’s stooped vale brushed my absent makeup. Armed children spared us home, our good-night hugs laissez-passer. We railed against the war. Soon, some of us bused south with SNCC and CORE. Soon, some of us got busted dealing drugs. The file clerks took exams and forged ahead. The decorators’ kitchens blazed persimmon. The secretary started kissing women, and so did I, and my three friends are dead.

Spring wafts up the smell of bus exhaust, of bread and fried potatoes, tips green on the branches, repeats old news: arrogance, ignorance, war. A cinder-block wall shared by two houses is new rubble. On one side was a kitchen sink and a cupboard, on the other was a bed, a bookshelf, three framed photographs. Glass is shattered across the photographs; two half-circles of hardened pocket bread sit on the cupboard. There provisionally was shelter, a plastic truck under the branches of a fig tree. A knife flashed in the kitchen, merely dicing garlic. Engines of war move inexorably toward certain houses while citizens sit safe in other houses reading the newspaper, whose photographs make sanitized excuses for the war. There are innumerable kinds of bread brought up from bakeries, baked in the kitchen: the date, the latitude, tell which one was dropped by a child beneath the bloodied branches. The uncontrolled and multifurcate branches of possibility infiltrate houses’ walls, windowframes, ceilings. Where there was a tower, a town: ash and burnt wires, a graph on a distant computer screen. Elsewhere, a kitchen table’s setting gapes, where children bred to branch into new lives were culled for war. Who wore this starched smocked cotton dress? Who wore this jersey blazoned for the local branch of the district soccer team? Who left this black bread and this flat gold bread in their abandoned houses? Whose father begged for mercy in the kitchen? Whose memory will frame the photograph and use the memory for what it was never meant for by this girl, that old man, who was caught on a ball field, near a window: war, exhorted through the grief a photograph revives. (Or was the team a covert branch of a banned group; were maps drawn in the kitchen, a bomb thrust in a hollowed loaf of bread?) What did the old men pray for in their houses of prayer, the teachers teach in schoolhouses between blackouts and blasts, when each word was flensed by new censure, books exchanged for bread, both hostage to the happenstance of war? Sometimes the only schoolroom is a kitchen. Outside the window, black strokes on a graph of broken glass, birds line up on bare branches. “This letter curves, this one spreads its branches like friends holding hands outside their houses.” Was the lesson stopped by gunfire? Was there panic, silence? Does a torn photograph still gather children in the teacher’s kitchen? Are they there meticulously learning war- time lessons with the signs for house, book, bread?

June Jordan, 1936-2002 I. The city where I knew you was swift. A lover cabbed to Brooklyn (broke, but so what) after the night shift in a Second Avenue diner. The lover was a Quaker, a poet, an anti-war activist. Was blonde, was twenty-four. Wet snow fell on the access road to the Manhattan Bridge. I was neither lover, slept uptown. But the arteries, streetlights, headlines, phonelines, feminine plural links ran silver through the night city as dawn and the yellow cab passed on the frost-blurred bridge, headed for that day’s last or first coffee. The city where I knew you was rich in bookshops, potlucks, ad hoc debates, demos, parades and picnics. There were walks I liked to take. I was on good terms with two rivers. You turned, burned, flame-wheel of words lighting the page, good neighbor on your homely street in Park Slope, whose Russian zaydes, Jamaican grocers, dyke vegetarians, young gifted everyone, claimed some changes —at least a new food co-op. In the laundromat, ordinary women talked revolution. We knew we wouldn’t live forever but it seemed as if we could. The city where I knew you was yours and mine by birthright: Harlem, the Bronx. Separately we left it and came separately back. There’s no afterlife for dialogue, divergences we never teased apart to weave back together. Death slams down in the midst of all your unfinished conversations. Whom do I address when I address you, larger than life as you always were, not alive now? Words are not you, poems are not you, ashes on the Pacific tide, you least of all. I talk to my- self to keep the line open. The city where I knew you is gone. Pink icing roses spelled out PASSION on a book-shaped chocolate cake. The bookshop’s a sushi bar now, and PASSION is long out of print. We have a Republican mayor. Threats keep citizens in line: anthrax; suicide attacks. A scar festers where towers once were; dissent festers unexpressed. You are dead of a woman’s disease. Who gets to choose what battle takes her down? Down to the ocean, friends mourn you, with no time to mourn. II. You, who stood alone in the tall bay window of a Brooklyn brownstone, conjuring morning with free-flying words, knew the power, terror in words, in flying; knew the high of solitude while the early light prowled Seventh Avenue, lupine, hungry like you, your spoils raisins and almonds, ballpoint pen, yellow foolscap. You, who stood alone in your courage, never hesitant to underline the connections (between rape, exclusion and occupation...) and separations were alone and were not alone when morning blotted the last spark of you out, around you voices you no longer had voice to answer, eyes you were blind to. All your loves were singular: you scorned labels. Claimed black;woman, and for the rest eluded limits, quicksilver (Caribbean), staked out self-definition. Now your death, as if it were “yours”: your house, your dog, your friends, your son, your serial lovers. Death’s not “yours,” what’s yours are a thousand poems alive on paper, in the present tense of a thousand students’ active gaze at printed pages and blank ones which you gave permission to blacken into outrage and passion. You, at once an optimist, a Cassandra, Lilith in the wilderness of her lyric, were a black American, born in Harlem, citizen soldier If you had to die—and I don’t admit it— who dared “What if, each time they kill a black man / we kill a cop?” couldn’t you take down with you a few prime villains in the capitol, who are also mortal? June, you should be living, the states are bleeding. Leaden words like “Homeland” translate abandoned dissident discourse. Twenty years ago, you denounced the war crimes still in progress now, as Jenin, Rammallah dominate, then disappear from the headlines. Palestine: your war. “To each nation, its Jews,” wrote Primo Levi. “Palestinians are Jews to Israelis.” Afterwards, he died in despair, or so we infer, despairing. Top each nation its Jews, its blacks, its Arabs, Palestinians, immigrants, its women. From each nation, its poets: Mahmoud Darwish, Kavanaugh, Shahid (who, beloved witness for silenced Kashmir, cautioned, shift the accent, and he was “martyr”), Audre Lorde, Neruda, Amichai, Senghor, and you, June Jordan.

Didn’t Sappho say her guts clutched up like this? Before a face suddenly numinous, her eyes watered, knees melted. Did she lactate again, milk brought down by a girl’s kiss? It’s documented torrents are unloosed by such events as recently produced not the wish, but the need, to consume, in us, one pint of Maalox, one of Kaopectate. My eyes and groin are permanently swollen, I’m alternatingly brilliant and witless —and sleepless: bed is just a swamp to roll in. Although I’d cream my jeans touching your breast, sweetheart, it isn’t lust; it’s all the rest of what I want with you that scares me shitless.

for Edmund White Lunch: as we close the twentieth century, death, like a hanger-on or a wanna-be 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 midafternoon, 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.

Instead of a cup of tea, instead of a milk- silk whelk of a cup, of a cup of nearly six o'clock teatime, cup of a stumbling block, cup of an afternoon unredeemed by talk, cup of a cut brown loaf, of a slice, a lack of butter, blueberry jam that's almost black, instead of tannin seeping into the cracks of a pot, the void of an hour seeps out, infects the slit of a cut I haven't the wit to fix with a surgeon's needle threaded with fine-gauge silk as a key would thread the cylinder of a lock. But no key threads the cylinder of a lock. Late afternoon light, transitory, licks the place of the absent cup with its rough tongue, flicks itself out beneath the wheel's revolving spoke. Taut thought's gone, with a blink of attention, slack, a vision of "death and distance in the mix" (she lost her words and how did she get them back when the corridor of a day was a lurching deck? The dream-life logic encodes in nervous tics she translated to a syntax which connects intense and unfashionable politics with morning coffee, Hudson sunsets, sex; then the short-circuit of the final stroke, the end toward which all lines looped out, then broke). What a gaze out the window interjects: on the southeast corner, a black Lab balks, tugged as the light clicks green toward a late-day walk by a plump brown girl in a purple anorak. The Bronx-bound local comes rumbling up the tracks out of the tunnel, over west Harlem blocks whose windows gleam on the animal warmth of bricks rouged by the fluvial light of six o'clock.