Marilyn Hacker Poems

August First: it was a year ago
we drove down from St.-Guilhem-le-Désert
to open the house in St. Guiraud
...

Cherry-ripe: dark sweet burlats, scarlet reverchons
firm-fleshed and tart in the mouth
bigarreaux, peach-and-white napoléons
as the harvest moves north
...

Said the old woman who barely spoke the language:
Freedom is a dream, and we don't know whose.
Said the insurgent who was now an exile:
When I began to write the story I started bleeding.
...

Wine again. The downside of any evening's
bright exchanges, scribbled with retribution :
stark awake, a tic throbs in the left temple's
site of bombardment.
...

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,
...

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
...

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
...

for Lewis Ellingham

The laughing soldiers fought to their defeat . . .
James Fenton, "In a Notebook"
White decorators interested in Art,
...