“You were as deep down as I’ve ever been. You were inside me like my pulse.”

Marilyn Hacker, “Nearly a Valediction”

"I felt pantheistic then— your heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours, and both in God’s."

Herman Melville, in a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne

"Listen, / how your heart pounds inside me."

Wislawa Szymborska, “Could Have”

Les ténèbres mangeront les ténèbres. (Darkness will devour the darkness.)

— Vénus Khoury-Ghata, She Says, transl by Marilyn Hacker, (2003)

Marilyn Hacker, Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons; from ‘Poète Maudite’

TEXT ID: There are lines of yours I know by heart. There are scents of yours soaked in my skin.

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.

You were inside me like my pulse.

Marilyn Hacker, from Winter Numbers: "Nearly a Valediction"

on death

marilyn hacker desesperanto: poems 1999-2002: "elegy for a soldier" \\ via @whiskeyandgrit \\ callie siskel mourner's logic (via @serratedpens)

kofi

IT WAS LOVE, I GUESS

a house in nebraska, ethel cain // nearly a valediction, marilyn hacker // morning in the burned house, margaret atwood // mabel: matryoshka (ep.28), becca de la rosa & mabel martin // hemlock grove, brian mcgreevy // one last poem for richard, sandra cisneros // fragrant is my many flower'd crown, lingua ignota // the loved and the unloved, françois mauriac

Didn’t Sappho say her guts clutched up like this? / Before a face suddenly numinous, / her eyes watered, knees melted.

By Marilyn Hacker, from [Didn’t Sappho say het guts clutched up like this?]

1, 2 𝘗𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘭𝘢 𝘊𝘎𝘛 Rod Smith// 3 @holly-warbs // 4 𝘓𝘰𝘷𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘛𝘪𝘮𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘚𝘰𝘤𝘪𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘮 Yellow House // 5 The Bear // 6 𝘙𝘶𝘯𝘢𝘸𝘢𝘺𝘴 𝘊𝘢𝘧𝘦 Marilyn Hacker

— Eight Days in April, Marilyn Hacker, in '100 Queer Poems, an anthology' (2022)

[text ID: A restaurant table's like a bed: we speak the way we do calmed after love, alone in the dark.]

She could bind the world's winds in a single strand.

Marilyn Hacker, from “Rune of the Finland Woman”

Didn’t Sappho say her guts clutched up like this? Before a face suddenly numinous, her eyes watered, knees melted. Did she lactate again, milk brought down by a girl’s kiss? It’s documented torrents are unloosed by such events as recently produced not the wish, but the need, to consume, in us, one pint of Maalox, one of Kaopectate. My eyes and groin are permanently swollen, I’m alternatingly brilliant and witless —and sleepless: bed is just a swamp to roll in. Although I’d cream my jeans touching your breast, sweetheart, it isn’t lust; it’s all the rest of what I want with you that scares me shitless.

— by Marilyn Hacker; Didn’t Sappho say her guts clutched up like this?

… writers who set language on fire for the pleasure of hearing it crackle, not as arsonists.

— Vénus Khoury-Ghata, She Says, transl by Marilyn Hacker, (2003)

I want our lives to touch / the way our minds do. 

Marilyn Hacker, Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons; from ‘Two nights without you is a little too much…’

Baby, the rain must, April rain must fall —and I would just as soon stay home and wait the storm out, wait for you to get to me your way. Somehow I muster the aplomb to say, if uptown feels like home, come home tonight: there’s food, there’s wine, you’ve got the key. I may go out. I won’t be back that late.

Marilyn Hacker, ... and Tuesday (from Love, Death, and the Changing of Seasons)

from “The Last April Interval” by Marilyn Hacker