Year’s End
by Marilyn Hacker
for Audre Lorde and Sonny Wainwright
Twice in my quickly disappearing forties
someone called while someone I loved and I were
making love to tell me another woman had died of cancer.
Seven years apart, and two different lovers:
underneath the numbers, how lives are braided,
how those women’s death and lives, lived and died, were
interleaved also.
Does lip touch on lip a memento mori?
Does the blood-thrust nipple against its eager
mate recall, through lust, a breast’s transformations
sometimes are lethal?
Now or later, what’s the enormous difference?
If one day is good, is a day sufficient?
Is it fear of death with which I’m so eager
to live my life out
now and in its possible permutations
with the one I love? (Only four days later,
she was on a plane headed west across the
Atlantic, work-bound.)
Men and women, mortally wounded where we
love and nourish, dying at thirty, forty,
fifty, not on barricades, but in beds of
unfulfilled promise:
tell me, senators, what you call abnormal?
Each day’s obits read as if there’s a war on.
Fifty-eight-year-old poet dead of cancer:
warrior woman
laid down with the other warrior women.
Both times when the telephone rang, I answered,
wanting not to, knowing I had to answer,
go from two bodies’
infinite approach to a crest of pleasure
through the disembodied voice from a distance
saying one loved body was clay, one wave of
mind burst and broken.
Each time we went back to each other’s hands and
mouths as to a requiem where the chorus
sings death with irrelevant and amazing
bodily music.
End of the poem
15 random poems
- From My Last Years. by Walt Whitman
- Олег Бундур – Доброта
- I Would Live In Your Love by Sara Teasdale
- Closed Path by Rabindranath Tagore
- Excelsior. by Walt Whitman
- Алексей Толстой – В совести искал я долго обвиненья
- Омар Хайям – Не зли других и сам не злись
- Вергилий – Георгики
- The Spring passing away by Shailendra Chauhan
- Алишер Навои – То не заросли тюльпанов
- Зинаида Александрова – Большая ложка
- A Song at Cock-Crow by Rudyard Kipling
- America
- Ольга Берггольц – Мой дом
- On a Fan of the Author’s Design poem – Alexander Pope
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).
