USA and FRANCE

PHOTO: SARA BARRETT

CREPUSCULE WITH MURIEL

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 the 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 south-east 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..


first published in TriQuarterly
also appeared in PN Review (UK)

OMELET
You can't break
eggs without making an omelette
That's what they
tell the eggs.
Randall Jarrell:
"War"

First, chop an onion and sauté it separately
in melted butter, unsalted, preferably.
Add mushrooms (add girolles in autumn)
Stir until golden and gently wilted.

Then, break the eggs as neatly as possible,
crack! on the copper lip of the mixing-bowl;
beat, frothing yolks and whites together,
thread with a filet of cream. You've melted

more butter in a scrupulous seven-inch
iron skillet: pour the mixture in swiftly, keep
flame high as edges puff and whiten.
Lower the flame to a reminiscence.

When I was twenty, living near Avenue
D, there were Sunday brunches at four o'clock.
Eggs were the necessary protein
hangovers (bourbon and pot) demanded.

Style: that's what faggots (that's what they called themselves)
used to make dreary illness and poverty
glitter. Not scrambled eggs, not fried eggs:
Jamesian omelettes, skill and gesture.

Soon after, "illness" wouldn't mean hangovers.
How many of those glamorous headachy
chefs sliding perfect crescents onto
disparate platters are middle-aged now?

Up, flame, and push the edges in carefully:
egg, liquid, flows out toward the perimeter.
Now, when the center bubbles thickly
spoon in the mushroom and onion mixture-

though the Platonic ideal omelette
has only hot, loose egg at its heart, with fresh
herbs, like the one that Lambert Strether
lunched on, and fell for that lost French lady.

Those were the lunchtime omelettes Claire and I
(three decades after the alphabet avenue
brunch) savored at the women's bookshop/
salon de thé, our manila folders

waiting for coffee - Emily Dickinson's
rare tenses and amphibious metaphors.
Browned, molten gold ran on the platter:
a homely lyric, with salad garland.

Outside, it rained in June, or was spring for a
brief February thaw. Now the bookshop's one
more Left Bank restaurant, with books for
"atmosphere": omelettes aren't served there

With (you've been using it all along) a wood
spatula, flip one half of the omelette
over the girolle-garnished other.
Eat it with somebody you'll remember.



first published in The Gay and Lesbian Review
also appeared in PN Review (UK)

ON THE STAIRWAY

My fourth-floor neighbor, Mme. Uyttebroeck-
Achard, a spinster in her seventies
wears champagne-froth lace sheaths above her knees
and patent-leather boots, and henna-red-
orange curls down to the white laminated
collar of her raincoat, like a striptease
artiste who's forgotten whom she needs to please.
She looks a lot like Violette Leduc.
On the dim stairway where she's paused and set
her shopping-bags down, the aide-ménagère
for Mme. Magin-Levacher, upstairs
one more flight, says Mme Uyttebroeck-Achard's "pas nette"--
not meaning "clean," but, in her dealings, "clear"
-- and I think of that muddy genius, Violette.

first published in Parnassus
also appeared in PN Review (UK)

GRIEF

Grief walks miles beside the polluted river,
grief counts days sucked into the winter solstice,
grief receives exuberant schoolyard voices
as flung despisals.

It will always be the first of September.
There will be Dominican boys whose soccer
game provides an innocent conversation
for the two people

drinking coffee, coatless. There will be sunset
roselight on the river like a cathedral.
There will be a rusty, amusing tugboat
pushing a barge home.

Did she think she knew what her friend intended?
Did she think her brother rejoiced to see her?
Did she think she'd sleep one more time till sunrise
holding her lover?

Grief has got no brother, sister or lover.
Grief finds friendship elsewhere. Grief, in the darkened
hours and hours before light flicks in one window
holds grief, a mirror.

Brother? He was dead, in a war-drained city.
Grief was shelling peas, with cold water running
in the sink; a harpsichord trilled Corelli
until the phone rang.

And when grief came home from a post-op nightwatch
two small girls looked reticent over homework.
Half the closet, half the drawers were empty.
Who was gone this time ?

Grief is isolationist, short-viewed. Grief lacks
empathy, compassion, imagination;
reads accounts of massacres, floods and earthquakes
mired in one story.

Grief is individual, bourgeois, common
and banal, two women's exchange in Sunday
market : "Le mari de Germaine est mort." They
fill bags with apples.

Grief is primagravida, in her fifth month.
Now she knows the fetus has died inside her.
Now she crosses shopping-streets on a sun-shot
mid-winter morning.

Winter licks the marrow from streets that open
onto parks and boulevards, rivers, river-
parallel parkways, arteries to bridges,
interstates, airports.

Grief daubs kohl on middle-aged burning eyelids.
Grief drives miles not noticing if the highway
runs beside an ocean, abandoned buildings
or blackened wheatfields

--and, in fact, she's indoors. Although her height is
average, massive furniture blocks and crowds her:
oak and pine, warm gold in their grain she thought would
ransom her season.

Workmen clear a path to repair the windows,
not with panes of light on their backs, no message-
bearers these. Still stubbornly green, a street leads
back to the river.

Fourteen years drained into the fifteen minutes
that it took a late-summer sun to douse its
light behind the opposite bank, the boys to
call their match over.

first published in The Nation
also appeared in PN Review (UK)

MIGRAINE SONNETS
Entre chien et loup

It's a long way from the bedroom to the kitchen
when all the thought in back of thought is loss.
How wide the dark rooms are you walk across
with a glass of water and a migraine
tablet. Sweat of hard dreams: unforgiven
silences, missed opportunities.
The night progresses like chronic disease,
symptom by symptom, sentences without pardon.
It's only half past two, you realize.
Five windows are still lit across the street.
You wonder: did you tell as many lies
as it now appears were told to you?
And if you told them, how did you not know
they were lies? Did you know, and then forget?

There were lies. Did you know, and then forget
if there was a lie in the peach orchard? There was the lie
a saxophone riffed on a storm-thick summer sky,
there was the lie on a post-card, there was the lie thought
and suggested, there was the lie stretched taut
across the Atlantic, there was the lie that lay
slack in the blue lap of a September day,
there was the lie in bed, there was the lie that caught
its breath when it came, there was the lie that wept.
There was the lie that read the newspaper.
There was the lie that fell asleep, its clear
face relaxing back to the face of a child.
There was the lie you held while you both slept.
A lie hung framed in the doorway, growing wild.

The face framed in the doorframe is a wild
card now, mouth could eat silence, mouth could speak
the indigestible. Eyes, oh tourmaline, a crack
in the glass, break the glass. Down a green-tiled
corridor double doors open. Who was wheeled
through, hallucinating on a gurney, weak
with relief as muscle and nerve flickered awake,
while a dreamed face framed in a doorframe opened and smiled?
Precisely no one's home. No dog will come
to lay his jowls across bent knees and drool
and smile the black-gummed smile he shares with wolves.
The empty doorframe frames an empty room
whose dim fluorescence is perpetual.
The double doors close back upon themselves.

The double doors close back upon themselves
The watcher from the woods rejoins the pack:
shadows on branches' steely lacework, black
on black, dark ornaments, dark wooden shelves.
Fever-wolves, guardians a lamp dissolves
in pitiless logic, as an insomniac
waits to hear the long night crack and break
into contaminated rusty halves.
This is the ninety-seventh (count) night watch in
the underbrush of hours closed on you since
a lie split open like a rotten fruit.
A metal band around your head begins
to tighten; pain shutters your eyes like too much light.
It's a long way from the bedroom to the kitchen.

first published in The Paris Review
also appeared in The London Magazine (UK)

RESPITE IN A MINOR KEY

I would like an unending stretch of drizzly
weekday afternoons, in a moulting season:
nowhere else to go but across the street for
bread, and the paper.

Later, faces, voices across a table,
or an autumn fricassee, cèpes and shallots,
sipping Gigondas as I dice and hum to
Charpentier's vespers.

No one's waiting for me across an ocean.
What I can't understand or change is distant.
War is a debate, or at worst, a headlined
nightmare. But waking

it will be there still, and one morning closer
to my implication in what I never
chose, elected, as my natal sky rains down
civilian ashes.


first appeared in The Nation
also appeared in PN Review (UK)

© All Copyright, Marilyn Hacker.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.