Ce qu'il reste à vivre
       

I waste the hours still left to me of life:
laundry, bronchitis, weightless messages,
perpetual distraction of the news:
disaster with explanatory graph,
a photo, survivors' shock and disbelief,
multiplied hourly in two languages.
I nurse my conscience, old child nursing a bruise.
Distress, desire, dismay, digression, grief
for the improbable. A passion turned
to an exchange of trivialities,
while crucial friendship dribbles out long distance.
A revolution where the cities burned
made the insurgents into refugees
and bare survival saps all their resistance.

                                     

And then it seemed survival meant resistance
to the unspeakable—its blusters, threats,
simian menaces and caprine bleats
(unfair to animals), sleepless insistence
that all remain aware of its existence ...
The splattered incoherence of its tweets
has sullied discourse, silenced our regrets
with fear and loathing. Oh, remember Wystan's
late lively efforts at a tour de force,
inured to politics by words in orders,
echoing Middle English, Greek, Latin, Norse,
that he could, wistful, ludic, rearrange.
The monoglots are having their revenge,
armed at their checkpoints, shutting down borders.

                                     

Subletters, roommates, short-term tenants, boarders
in wintry walk-ups of precarity—
unemployed, overage, widowed, refugee
or redundant—senescent hoarders
of lit mags, Libyan dinars, rolls of quarters:
here we are, hunkered down, superfluous.
The times are dark. The dark settles on us.
Disaster's somewhere that they 've sent reporters.
It's night at five again. The paisley throws
still rumpled in the morning's disarray,
would make a Flemish still-life. Write till nine,
but just translations, footnotes, throwaway
opinion, and, more lightly (I suppose)
another postcard about rain and wine.

                                     

Another postcard about rain and wine,
gracenote in a cacophony of wars,
posted, during a brief foray outdoors
in hovering daylight, in the rain again.
A year of our disgrace is closing down—
so many plurals might define that "our."
"White women have a lot to answer for,"
a friend wrote, smarting, who is neither one.
Ahed Tamimi, Palestinian
resistant, high-schooler, veteran at sixteen,
came at them bare-handed, a pagan spear
invading the invaders. Her wild hair
tied back, she looked, in the Israeli courtroom, "white,
sat in an Israeli jail, last night, tonight.

                                     

you say it, waking in the night,
a heartbeat word, without, without, without
friendship love sunlight fortune freedom-doubt
a constant, like injustice. Down a flight
of stairs, the drilling starts at half-past eight,
while, on a screen, an article about
Ahed, her child face as the guard shoves her out
of range, her crinkled mane catching the light
—accompanied by words: eight months in jail
where she will study, study war some more.
She could be Rachel Corrie's younger sib.
She could be in Suweida or Idlib,
or coming upstairs with bread, milk, the mail,
taking her shoes off when she comes in the door.

                                     

As he knelt in the doorway to take off his shoes,
we were already volleying conversation
about ... for three years, it was "revolution,"
the last Skype, the next night flight, how to be of use,
and what—doctorate, girlfriend—he might lose
to all-night dispatches, three-way translation,
my jade buddha, his imposed vocation,
since he could ...
                    An old and almost stateless Jew's
opinions braided with new verbs for
desire, dismay, a waft of cardamom,
when we'd gone upstairs with the dictionaries.
What's happened to the revolutionaries?
Silence. A conversation that's become
irrelevant, a footnote, an erasure.

                                     

Not even a footnote—an erasure
of her name from this memoir by her ex.
I put the book down. We each have our own facts.
Ivory/onyx votive figures, stature
ascending, fill a luminous enclosure,
because her face, hieratic, was like thatwhen
she wasn't rolling a cigarette
as she scribbled and drank coffee, her composure
the tension of a dancer on a wire,
at once an artist and a prisoner,
extracting a poem from a news brief
that in my own penumbra I'd translate,
while she, in her exile's elsewhere, stayed up late
devouring hours still left to her of life.

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Copyright © 2019 Marilyn Hacker All rights reserved
from New Letters
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission