Marilyn Hacker: Exiles

Exiles

Her brown falcon perches above the sink
as steaming water forks over my hands.
Below the wrists they shrivel and turn pink.
I am in exile in my own land.

Her half-grown cats scuffle across the floor
trailing a slime of blood from where they fed.
I lock the door. They claw under the door.
I am an exile in my own bed.

Her spotted mongrel, bristling with red mange,
sleeps on the threshold of the Third Street bar
where I drink brandy as the couples change.
I am in exile where my neighbors are.

On the pavement, cans of ashes burn.
Her green lizard scuttles from the light
around torn cardboard charred to glowing fern.
I am in exile in my own sight.

Her blond child sits on the stoop when I come
back at night. Cold hands, blue lids; we both
need sleep. She tells me she is going to die.
I am in exile in my own youth.

Lady of distances, this fire, this water,
this earth makes sanctuary where I stand.
Call of your animals and your blond daughter,
I am in exile in my own hands.


The poem "Exiles" by Marilyn Hacker discusses someone that lives and learns to relax when things tend to happen when she is surrounded by it. The lady that is involved in the story learns to take away and release everything that tends to create a stress to her a create a distraction towards her presence. She tries to to hide her feelings by saying i am in exile in my own hands. Exile means the thought of being away and or restricted from coming to a certain place.
     


 

Marilyn Hacker: Winter Numbers

“Lovely and unremarkable, the clutter
of mugs and books, the almost-empty Fig
Newtons box, thick dishes in a big
tin tray, the knife still standing in the butter,
change like the color of river water
in the delicate shift to day. Thin fog
veils the hedges, where a neighbor dog
makes rounds. 'Go to bed. It doesn't matter
about the washing-up. Take this book along.'
Whatever it was we said that night is gone,
framed like a photograph nobody took.
Stretched out on a camp cot with the book,
I think that we will talk all night again,
there, or another where, but I am wrong.”


Marilyn Hacker's Winter Number discusses things that seem to dissapear in a persons life. The line that says "Thin fog veils the hedges, where a neighbor dog makes rounds" shows a similarity between one another. It says that a dog could stay up for a long period of time and so does thin fog that veils the hedges.

Marilyn Hacker: Scars On Paper

Scars on Paper

An unwrapped icon, too potent to touch,
she freed my breasts from the camp Empire dress.
Now one of them's the shadow of a breast
with a lost object's half-life, with as much
life as an anecdotal photograph:
me, Kim and Iva, all stripped to the waist,
hiking near Russian River on June first
'79: Iva's five-and-a-half.
While she was almost twenty, wearing black
T-shirts in D.C., where we hadn't met.
You lay your palm, my love, on my flat chest.
In lines alive with what is not regret,
she takes her own path past, doesn't turn back.
Persistently, on paper, we exist.

Persistently, on paper, we exist.
You'd touch me if you could, but you're, in fact,
three thousand miles away. And my intact
body is eighteen months paper: the past
a fragile eighteen months regime of trust
in slash-and-burn, in vitamin pills, backed
by no statistics. Each day I enact
survivor's rituals, blessing the crust
I tear from the warm loaf, blessing the hours
in which I didn't or in which I did
consider my own death. I am not yet
statistically a survivor (that
is sixty months). On paper, someone flowers
and flares alive. I knew her. But she's dead.

She flares alive. I knew her. But she's dead.
I flirted with her, might have been her friend,
but transatlantic schedules intervened.
She wrote a book about her Freedom Ride,
the wary elders whom she taught to read,
— herself half-British, twenty-six, white-blonde,
with thirty years to live.
And I happened
to open up The Nation to that bad
news which I otherwise might not have known
(not breast cancer: cancer of the brain).
Words take the absent friend away again.
Alone, I think, she called, alone, upon
her courage, tried in ways she'd not have wished
by pain and fear: her courage, extinguished.

The pain and fear some courage extinguished
at disaster's denouement come back
daily, banal: is that brownish-black
mole the next chapter? Was the ache enmeshed
between my chest and armpit when I washed
rogue cells' new claw, or just a muscle ache?
I'm not yet desperate enough to take
comfort in being predeceased: the anguish
when the Harlem doctor, the Jewish dancer,
die of AIDS, the Boston seminary's
dean succumbs "after brief illness" to cancer.
I like mossed slabs in country cemeteries
with wide-paced dates, candles in jars, whose tallow
glows on summer evenings, desk-lamp yellow.

Aglow in summer evening, a desk-lamp's yellow
moonlight peruses notebooks, houseplants, texts,
while an aging woman thinks of sex
in the present tense. Desire may follow,
urgent or elegant, cut raw or mellow
with wine and ripe black figs: a proof, the next
course, a simple question, the complex
response, a burning sweetness she will swallow.
The opening mind is sexual and ready
to embrace, incarnate in its prime.
Rippling concentrically from summer's gold
disc, desire's iris expands, steady
with blood beat. Each time implies the next time.
The aging woman hopes she will grow old.

The aging woman hopes she will grow old.
A younger woman has a dazzling vision
of bleeding wrists, her own, the clean incisions
suddenly there, two open mouths. They told
their speechless secrets, witnesses not called
to what occurred with as little volition
of hers as these phantom wounds.
Intense precision
of scars, in flesh, in spirit. I'm enrolled
by mine in ranks where now I'm "being brave"
if I take off my shirt in a hot crowd
sunbathing, or demonstrating for Dyke Pride.
Her bravery counters the kitchen knives'
insinuation that the scars be made.
With, or despite our scars, we stay alive.

"With, or despite our scars, we stayed alive
until the Contras or the Government
or rebel troops came, until we were sent
to 'relocation camps' until the archives
burned, until we dug the ditch, the grave
beside the aspen grove where adolescent
boys used to cut class, until we went
to the precinct house, eager to behave
like citizens..."
I count my hours and days,
finger for luck the word-scarred table which
is not my witness, shares all innocent
objects' silence: a tin plate, a basement
door, a spade, barbed wire, a ring of keys,
an unwrapped icon, too potent to touch.


In this poem it's very heartbroken, and it talks about how people around her is dying from cancer. Her life is very sad and it's to much going on in her life. She's going through struggles dealing with both her friends and family. While trying to cope with her daily life she tries to handle what had happen in the past. She tells about her past about how she was sent to relocation camps and escaped when it caught on fire.



 

Marilyn Hacker: Nearly A Valediction

Nearly A Valediction

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.

In this poem  I found that nearly every line consisted of ten syllables, nearly. Of course, there are breaks in this pattern and they are used to change the tone of the poem or escalate an emotional phrase. The first break in this pattern occurs in the first stanza when the poem reads: "dozer, like the van that missed my skull". Here, the line is filled with nine syllables as compared to the surrounding lines composed of ten. Because the reader has  found the ten-syallable rhythm prior to reading this line, a slight pause in inserted after the word "skull" . It seemed like there was a need to fill the gap. "like the van that missed my skull" is a really powerful and visual phrase and that added pause works to further illustrate this portrait inside your head. It furthers the tone of loss of control in the stanza.
In the second stanza, "The U.S. dollar dived since you happened to me" is an eleven-syallable break from the ten-syllable pattern. The emotional tone of this complete thought stands out in the stanza as a result. The line is a complete thought, a full sentence, and it feels like something that you would throw at someone if you were in an argument, something that you would just blurt out...and this is how it comes across in the poem. It's a break, of some kind of emotion anger and passion. And then, the stanza returns to it's ten-syllable pattern.

Marilyn Hacker:The Bus Driver

What has gotten into the bus driver
Who has left his bus, who has sat down
On a curb on the Place de l'Opéra
Where he slips into the ease of being
Nothing more than his own tears? The passers-by
Who bend over such a shared and
Presentable sorrow would like him
To tell them that the wind used to know
How to come out of the woods towards a woman's dress,
Or that one day his brother said to him
Even your shadow wants nothing to do with you.
His feet in a puddle, the bus driver
Can only repeat This work is hard
And people aren't kind.


Marilyn Hacker's the bus driver, seems depressing it walks about a bus driver that is on a curve that is having a bad day. he is sad becaue of how hard it is to be a driver. the imagery is that the bus driver doesn't feel like people doesn't appreciate what he does. Then he runs to sit on a curb and cry his eyes out. He gets frustrated about how hard is job is and he thinks people don't care about him.

Marilyn Hacker: Cancer Winter

 

I woke up, and the surgeon said, ‘You’re cured.’ Strapped to the gurney, in the cotton gown and pants I was wearing when they slid me down onto the table, made news straps secure while I stared at the hydra-headed O.R. lamp, I took in the tall, confident, brown-skinned man, and the ache I couldn’t quite call pain from where my right breast wasn’t anymore to my armpit. A not-yet-talking head, I bit dry my lips. What else could he have said? And then my love was there in a hospital coat; then my old love, still young and very scared. Then I, alone, graphed clock hands’ asymptote to noon, when I would be wheeled back upstairs. (...)

The hand that held the cup next was my daughter’s – who would be holding shirts for me to wear, sleeve out, for my bum arm. She’d wash my hair (not falling yet), strew teenager’s disorder in the kitchen, help me out of the bathwater. A dozen times, she looked at the long scar studded with staples, where I’d suckled her, and didn’t turn. She took me / I brought her to the surgeon’s office, where she’d hold my hand, while his sure hand, with its neat tool, snipped the steel, as on a revised manuscript radically rewritten since my star turn nursing her without a ‘nursing bra’ from small, firm breasts, a twenty-five-year-old’s.

These fourteen sonnets interweave themselves to form a unified work, just as lines are repeated or echoed to interweave in the individual poems, providing an account of the author’s experience of breast cancer, radical mastectomy, and recovery. The medical details appear more prominently in the early sonnets, but gradually, other themes take precedence: suffering and how to compare relative degrees of suffering among individuals and groups; the reaction of oneself and one’s lovers to a disfigured body; and the search for affirmation, for a reason to want to live and be rid of the horror of disease and death.  
The theme of comparative suffering recurs in the twelfth sonnet, as Hacker remembers friends who died, or strangers whose death she read of, all of whose requiems she feels inadequate to sing. Hacker even acknowledges in the fifth sonnet that this recurring issue has its limits, "a form of gallows humor," but her poems are nevertheless her effort to "do what I can." Given that so many sufferers find these things nearly unspeakable--whether war crimes or diseases--the sequence of sonnets is a powerful achievement.

Gwendolyn Brooks: The Bean Eaters

They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.
Dinner is a casual affair.
Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,
Tin flatware.

Two who are Mostly Good.
Two who have lived their day,
But keep on putting on their clothes
And putting things away.

And remembering . . .
Remembering, with twinklings and twinges,
As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that
          is full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths,
          tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.


The poem is about a couple who eat beans. It's a sufficiently important characteristic that Brooks makes it the title. It's the opening words "They eat beans mostly..." Hardly a riveting choice of meal. It's rather bland and unappetising. Difficult to believe that the old pair eat beans so often by choice. There's also a regularity and routine to their meals. This is the characteristic which, given the title choice, apparently defines the old pair. What else do we know about them? They're old, yellow and, given that very long list of objects that closes the poem, hoarders.