Calligraphies V

Abstract

Calligraphies V Marilyn Hacker (bio) Late fall, near midnight,walking home alone from aloquacious dinner, I saw, heard, cop cars, sirens,thought: There's a big fire somewhere. Japanese touristsdescend from buses now, takeattack-site selfies. Illegal demonstrations.Terrorism: déjà vu. * Déjà vu, hard rainafter unseasonableblue bright mornings. You Google whom you once loved:wedding photo at fifty, face, body, thickened,shrunk, out of your fantasies.And what would you say [End Page 15] who said so much once overthose neutral restaurant tables? * Winter's not neutral:damp infiltrates bronchialpassages. You've coughed since that Burgundy Christmaspneumonia, twenty years past. But light's coming back.But a medical studentblew himself up in a square in Sultanahmetwhere you've been a tourist too. * She's been arguing,she's fed up with rhetoric,easy amalgams. You dip bread in olive oil,then dip it in the za'atar. Back from Geneva,with comrades at peace talks thataren't going to happen — You proofread her news-brief, seehow her frayed shirt is ripping. * [End Page 16] Attention frayingin late afternoon light, soonday will be done, not the work incumbent on it— whatever that might have been– Gnarls of an old textin the other alphabet:can I unknot them, reweave a mirror fabricof the unraveled phrases? * A day unravelsthat she, he, they spent waitingin line in rain in administrative limboor the emergency room. Are you immigrantsor political exilesor refugees? Words with different valences insubliminal translation. * Liminal space whereexiles with dictionarieslose themselves: barzakh, [End Page 17] Arabic isthmus, the spanfrom death to resurrection in Farsi: limbo,where Socrates murmurs tounbaptized babies in contrapuntal cognatesthey hear fardous, paradise. * Infantile, senile,when I read out loud I stop,stammer and stutter then pronounce everything wrong.An illiterate lover worse than the peasantaccents of emigrants whoreturn years later to the villages where theirmothers did not learn to read. * My mother would readto me- fables, fairy tales—until the day I said I could read them myself,and I did. I was three. [End Page 18] My mother would readmy notebooks, search desk drawerswhile I was at school. I had to tear up and flushmy revolts down the toilet. * Down the rain-splashed street,try not to keep your eyes downwhile the sky weighs down on the wrong side of winter.You don't forget you aren't young. Still, there's arrival—the desposeidos' priestmakes time for welcome, more liminal narrativesover midnight bacalão. [End Page 19] Marilyn Hacker Marilyn Hacker is the author of thirteen books of poems, including A Stranger's Mirror (Norton) and Names (Norton), and an essay collection, Unauthorized Voices (Michigan). Her translations from the French include Marie Etienne's King of a Hundred Horsemen (Farrar Strauss and Giroux), which received the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and Emmanuel Moses's Preludes and Fugues (Oberlin). For her own work, she received the PEN Voelcker Award for poetry. She lives in Paris. Copyright © 2018 University of Nebraska Press