Poetry, A Vision of the Future (Marilyn Hacker)

for Geneviève Pastre
Early summer in what I hope is "midlife,"
and the sunlight makes me its own suggestions
when I take my indolence to the river
and breathe the breeze in.

Years, here, seem to blend into one another.
Houseboats, tugs, and barges don’t change complexion
drastically (warts, wrinkles) until gestalt-shift
dissolves the difference.

Sentence fragments float on a wave of syntax,
images imprinted in contemplation,
indistinct impressions of conversations
which marked some turning.

Food and drink last night with a friend - we’ve twelve years
history of Burgundy and good dinners
and as many books off the press between us
toasted together.

Writing is a difficult form of reading.
Paragraphs that roll away from their moorings
seem like passages to another language
half-comprehended.

Sometimes thought is more like a bad translation.
Hazy shapes resistant to sentence-structure
intimate - but what do they mean, exactly?
Texture, sound, odor

(dockside, urinous, up on green slopes, roses
in full bloom like elegant girls of forty)
imprint images in aleatoric
absence of order.

Isolated words can unlock a story:
what you ate, she felt when she heard the music,
what's brought back by one broken leaf, whose sticky
sap on a finger

named a green, free season to city children.

Now, daylight's duration is equinoctial:
spring is turning swiftly to summer; summer's
ripeness brings endings.

I can feel a change in the weather coming.
When I catch a glimpse of myself in mirrors,
I see someone middle-aged, with my mother's
sallow complexion.

Whom do we write books for? Our friends? Our daughters?
Last night’s dinner companion has two daughters,
women in their thirties with strong opinions.
My child is younger,

might say there won’t be books in the "2000’s,"
just "hard copy" "downloaded" from computers.
Children won’t haunt library aisles, as I did,
tracking their futures.

(What about the homeless man reading science
fiction on the steps of St. Paul, a tattered
paperback, a galaxy on the cover
he was approaching?)

Houses are precarious or unsettling.
We who left them young, and applaud our daughters'
rootlessness still scrutinize wind-chapped faces
of pavement-dwellers.

"Every woman’s one man away from welfare"
- he may be a college trustee, a landlord
or a bland, anonymous civil servant
balancing budgets.

My friend's postcard goddesses, morning teapot,
Greek and Latin lexicons, Mac computer,
fill the magic cave of a room she works in
which she'll be leaving

when her lease is up (as provincial theater
troupes strike sets, pack trunks), lares and penates
ready to be set on a desk and bookshelves
in closer quarters

where she'll reestablish haphazard suppers
on her Cévennes grandmother’s round oak table.
Where will I be? Too many airline tickets
away to answer.

(I lead two lives superimposed upon each
other, on two continents, in two cities,
make believe my citizenship is other
than that blue passport's.)

But today there's wind on the Seine; a tugboat
with embroidered curtains and gardened windows
looks like home as it navigates the river
toward other moorings.
- Again, the River by Marilyn Hacker