Calligraphies by Marilyn Hacker

Author:Marilyn Hacker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2023-02-21T00:00:00+00:00

Calligraphies X

Like Jude the Obscure,

you wait beneath the vaulting

of a corridor

where you never belonged and

nothing here belongs to you.

How sallow your skin,

how outmoded your clothing,

how crumpled your face,

while multiethnic students

stroll past, bright-caparisoned.

**

How bright the past looks,

when that was being forty,

free, in an airport

on some Adonic journey

or in a more recent year

believing in the

revolution you kissed her,

kissed him away to—

Kafranbel’s Friday demo

recounted to you in French.

**

The French woman who

can’t go back to Damascus

shouted at her friend

the activist refugee:

The Kurds were right to keep out!

Now it’s civil war!

The two Kurds—one’s her husband—

said nothing. Around

us on the lawn, families

heard Arabic, and wondered.

**

I wonder about

my friend in Jerusalem.

Imru al-Qays is

his muse, if you will, and he

translates Palestinians.

A scholar my age,

protests what former exiles

inflict on exiles,

but why that street, that hill, in

all the diasporic world?

**

Diasporic grave,

narrow as a ploughed furrow,

elbowed in on both sides

by riverains of Montreuil

who lived and died there, while she

was housed there by chance:

political refugee’s

right to a lodging—

accidental neighbourhood,

now her accidental tomb.

**

Tadmor tomb portraits,

the person’s name and “Alas”

beside his, her face

in the little museum

in Hamra, empty today

brother and sister,

a distraught-looking lady,

a husband and wife,

Palmyra, empty today.

Khaled al-Asa’ad: Alas.

**

Antigone was

a role for her, and I know

she played the part

in Arabic, as I saw

it played in Saint-Denis by

Palestinian

actors. In Damascus, she

was in a theatre.

Then they were outside, the stage

built in haste, the words her own.

**

There was a word I

didn’t know in your letter,

almost a friend’s name,

one character different. I

looked it up, and it means death.

The rebel who tied

her wild hair back to speak at

Fadwa’s funeral

is gone, forty-nine, no one

quite knows how, why. Some love kills.

**

Some lovely useless

ubiquitous foreign word,

bougainvillea

blooming well into July,

framing blue vistas of sea.

An orange cat walks

by. There are hundreds, not strays

but the descendants

of civil war survivors

abandoned in this barzakh.

**

Stacked in abandon

of any order but what

might catch the eye, books

you now imagine reading,

al-Jahiz and al-Ma’arri

and here, this woman

an essay revealed to you,

dead too soon, poems

a dictionary lights up

as you probe among the roots.

**

If Abiah Root

had kept writing letters to

her friend Emily

after she moved to Beirut,

and if Emily wrote back . . .

Amherst to Beirut—

birds of imagination

circle the Corniche,

invisible ink quatrains:

where, with them, would harbour be?

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