Nearly A Valediction
by Marilyn Hacker
You happened to me. I was happened to
like an abandoned building by a bull-
dozer, like the van that missed my skull
happened a two-inch gash across my chin.
You were as deep down as I’ve ever been.
You were inside me like my pulse. A new-
born flailing toward maternal heartbeat through
the shock of cold and glare: when you were gone,
swaddled in strange air I was that alone
again, inventing life left after you.
I don’t want to remember you as that
four o’clock in the morning eight months long
after you happened to me like a wrong
number at midnight that blew up the phone
bill to an astronomical unknown
quantity in a foreign currency.
The U.S. dollar dived since you happened to me.
You’ve grown into your skin since then; you’ve grown
into the space you measure with someone
you can love back without a caveat.
While I love somebody I learn to live
with through the downpulled winter days’ routine
wakings and sleepings, half-and-half caffeine-
assisted mornings, laundry, stock-pots, dust-
balls in the hallway, lists instead of longing, trust
that what comes next comes after what came first.
She’ll never be a story I make up.
You were the one I didn’t know where to stop.
If I had blamed you, now I could forgive
you, but what made my cold hand, back in prox-
imity to your hair, your mouth, your mind,
want where it no way ought to be, defined
by where it was, and was and was until
the whole globed swelling liquefied and spilled
through one cheek’s nap, a syllable, a tear,
was never blame, whatever I wished it were.
You were the weather in my neighborhood.
You were the epic in the episode.
You were the year poised on the equinox.
End of the poem
15 random poems
- Aphrodite – The Birth by Uma Maheswari Anandane
- To Sir George Howland Beaumont, Bart From the South-West Coast Or Cumberland 1811 by William Wordsworth
- To a Virtuous Young Lady poem – John Milton poems
- Good-bye by Walter de la Mare
- The Looking-Glass. : on Mrs. Pulteney poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster
- Erin! The Tear and the Smile in Thine Eyes by Thomas Moore
- Andrea del Sarto by Robert Browning
- plato.html
- Юнна Мориц – Зейдер-Зее
- I Stood With the Dead by Siegfried Sassoon
- Poetic Dilemma by Pawan Kumar
- Scots, Wha Hae Wi’ Wallace Bled by Robert Burns
- Ольга Седакова – Успение
- In Paths Untrodden. by Walt Whitman
- Casualty by Winifred Mary Letts
Some external links:
Duckduckgo.com – the alternative in the US
Quant.com – a search engine from France, and also an alternative, at least for Europe
Yandex – the Russian search engine (it’s probably the best search engine for image searches).
