Scars on paper

Persistently, on paper, we exist.
You’d touch me if you could, but you’re, in fact,
three thousand miles away. And my intact
body is eighteen months paper: the past
a fragile eighteen months regime of trust
in slash-and-burn, in vitamin pills, backed
by no statistics. Each day I enact
survivor’s rituals, blessing the crust
I tear from the warm loaf, blessing the hours
in which I didn’t or in which I did
consider my own death. I am not yet
statistically a survivor (that
is sixty months). On paper, someone flowers
and flares alive….
I count my hours and days,
finger for luck the word-scarred table which
is not my witness, shares all innocent
objects’ silence: a tin plate, a basement
door, a spade, barbed wire, a ring of keys,
an unwrapped icon, too potent to touch.

Essay on Departure

and when you leave and no-one’s left behind
do you leave a cluttered room, a window framing
a zinc roof, other mansard windows? do you
leave a row of sycamores, a river that flows
in your nocturnal pulse, a moon
sailing late-risen through clouds silvered
by the lights flung up by bridges? you leave
the one and then the other,
everywhere you’re leaving something,
leaving no-one, leaving as a season fades.
leaving the crisp anticipation of
the new, before its gold drops on the rain -
slick crossings, to the walkways over
bridges, remembered details.
you’re no longer there.

what’s left when you have left, when what is left is
coins on the table and an empty cup?
as you leave the place, you bring the time
you spent there to a closed parenthesis.
now it is part of that amorphous past,
parceled into flashes, slide-vignettes.
you’ll never know if just what you forget’s
the luminous and the right detail, the key -
but to a door that’s no longer there, no longer yours,
glimpse of a morning-lit interior’s
awakening silhouette, with the good blue
sky reflected on the tall blue walls,
then shadow swallows what was/wasn’t true,
shutters the windows, sheathes the shelves in dust,
retains a sour taste and discards the kiss,
clings to the mood stripped of its narrative.
you take the present tense along. the place
you’re leaving stops, dissolves into a past
in which it may have been, or it may not
have been (corroborate, but it’s still gone)
the place you were, the moment that you leave.

- Marilyn Hacker