that sometimes differed from those of her neighbors.
Reading alone the horrible headlines, when
there was public outrage, she would know private grief.
Her obituary would be vague and brief:
there was nothing to interest historians in her letters.
Morning News
Spring wafts up the smell of bus exhaust, of bread and fried potatoes, tips green on the branches, repeats old news: arrogance, ignorance, war.
A cinder-block wall shared by two houses is new rubble. On one side was a kitchen sink and a cupboard, on the other was a bed, a bookshelf, three framed photographs.
Glass is shattered across the photographs; two half-circles of hardened pocket bread sit on the cupboard. There provisionally was shelter, a plastic truck under the branches of a fig tree. A knife flashed in the kitchen, merely dicing garlic. Engines of war move inexorably toward certain houses
while citizens sit safe in other houses reading the newspaper, whose photographs make sanitized excuses for the war.
There are innumerable kinds of bread brought up from bakeries, baked in the kitchen: the date, the latitude, tell which one was dropped by a child beneath the bloodied branches.
The uncontrolled and multifurcate branches of possibility infiltrate houses’ walls, windowframes, ceilings. Where there was a tower, a town: ash and burnt wires, a graph on a distant computer screen. Elsewhere, a kitchen table’s setting gapes, where children bred to branch into new lives were culled for war.
Who wore this starched smocked cotton dress? Who wore this jersey blazoned for the local branch of the district soccer team? Who left this black bread and this flat gold bread in their abandoned houses? Whose father begged for mercy in the kitchen?
Whose memory will frame the photograph and use the memory for what it was
never meant for by this girl, that old man, who was caught on a ball field, near a window: war, exhorted through the grief a photograph revives. (Or was the team a covert branch of a banned group; were maps drawn in the kitchen, a bomb thrust in a hollowed loaf of bread?)
What did the old men pray for in their houses
of prayer, the teachers teach in schoolhouses between blackouts and blasts, when each word was flensed by new censure, books exchanged for bread, both hostage to the happenstance of war?
Sometimes the only schoolroom is a kitchen.
Outside the window, black strokes on a graph of broken glass, birds line up on bare branches.
“This letter curves, this one spreads its branches like friends holding hands outside their houses.”
Was the lesson stopped by gunfire? Was there panic, silence? Does a torn photograph still gather children in the teacher’s kitchen?
Are they there meticulously learning wartime lessons with the signs for house, book, bread?
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 from bridges? Do you leave the wicker chairs the cafe owner stacks at half-past-midnight while the last small clutch of two girls and a boy smoke and discuss what twenty-year-olds in cafes discuss past midnight, with no war on here? You leave the one and then the other, the all-night eight-aisles-of-sundries with a pharmacy cloned six times in one mile on upper Broadway 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, the schoolyard’s newly painted porte-cochere: 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?
An August lapse begins; the shutters drop and lock, whatever follows is conjecture.
The sound feels final, punitive, a trap shutting its jaws, though when the selfsame structure was rolled up mornings, it was hopeful noise, a reprieve from insomnia, a day’s
presence opening possibility.
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 forgets
the numinous and right detail, the key—
but to a door that is 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.
s
BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY
3 9999 04702 744 4
BAKER & TAYLOR
MARILYN HACKERY
honors include a National Book Award. She lives in Paris and New York, where she teaches at City College of New York. Her most recent books are First Cities: Collected Early Poems ic)6o-iC)jc y, Squares and Courtyards ; Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons ; Winter Numbers ; and Selected Poems: 1965-1990, all of which are available in Norton paperback editions.
Jacket design by Laurie Dolphin Design Jacket photograph by Laurie Dolphin Author photograph by Margaretta K. Mitchell Printed in the United States of America
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