Coda by Marilyn Hacker
Maybe it was jet lag, maybe not,
but I was smoking in the kitchen: six,
barely, still dark: beyond the panes, a mix
of summer storm and autumn wind. I got
back to you; have I got you back? What
warmed me wasn't coffee, it was our
revivified combustion. In an hour,
gray morning, but I'd gone back to my spot
beside you, sleeping, where we'd stayed awake
past exhaustion, talking, after, through
the weeks apart, divergent times and faces.
I fell asleep, skin to warm skin, at daybreak.
Your breasts, thighs, shoulders, mouth, voice, are the places
I live, whether or not I live with you.
Fog hid the road. The wipers shoved back torrents
across the windshield. You, on knife-edge, kept
driving. Iva, in the back seat, wept
histrionically. The crosscurrents
shivered like heat-lightning into the parent's
shotgun seat. I shut up, inadept
at deflecting them. A Buick crept
ahead at twenty-five an hour. "Why aren't
we passing him? My Coke spilled. The seat's wet.
You guys keep whispering so I can't hear."
"Sit in the front with us, then."
"No! I'll get
too hot. Is the fan on? What time is it?
What time will it be when we get there?"
Time to be somewhere else than where we are.
"What do we have? I guess we still don't know."
I was afraid to say, you made me feel
my sectioned heart, quiescent loins, and spill
past boundaries the way blackberry-brambles grow
up those tenacious hills I left for you.
Their gritty fruit's ripe now, but oceans still
separate us, waves opaque as oatmeal,
miles of fog roiling between your pillow
and mine while you say your best: sometimes, she's where
your compass points, despite you, though a meal
with me, or talk, is good . . . Where our starfire
translated depths, low fog won't let you steer
by sight. The needle fingers one desire,
and no other direction can compel.
If no other direction can compel
me upward from the dark-before-the-dawn
descending spiral, I drop like a stone
flung into some scummed-over stagnant well.
The same momentum with which once we fell
across each other's skies, meteors drawn
by lodestones taproots clutched in unmapped ground
propels me toward some amphibious hell
where kissing's finished, and I tell, tell, tell
reasons as thick and sticky as frogspawn:
had I done this, that wouldn't have come undone.
The wolf of wolf's hour cried at once too often
picks out enfeebled stragglers by the smell
of pond scum drying on them in the sun.
I miss you more than when I was in France
and thought I'd soon be done with missing you.
I miss what we'd have made past making do,
haft meshing weft as autumn days advance,
transliterating variegated strands
of silk, hemp, ribbon, flax, into some new
texture. I missed out on misconstrued
misgivings; did I miss my cue; boat? Chanc-
es are, the answer's missing too. At risk
again, sleep and digestion, while I seize on
pricklier strands, crushed to exude the reason
I can't expect you'll ring up from your desk,
calling me Emer, like Cuchulain's queen,
to say, we need bread and some salad greens.
On your birthday, I reread Meredith,
whose life's mean truths inform, tonight, his text
so generously framed. There'll be the next
night, and the next, cold gaps. I'd have been with
you now, lover and friend, across the width
of some candle-lit table as we mixed
habit and hope in toasts. Instead, perplexed
by separation like a monolith
bulked in the rooms and hours I thought would be
ours, I practice insensibility.
We crossed four miles, three thousand. You diminish
now, on a fogged horizon, far away.
Your twenty-fifth was our first class Tuesday
-will one year bracket us from start to finish?
Will one year bracket us from start to finish,
who, in an evening's gallant banter, made
plans for new voyages to span decades
of love and work around a world we'd win? Wish
was overgrown with fears; voyages vanish
with empty wine bottles and summer's paid
bills. Lengthens the legendary blade
between us: silence; hope I hope to banish;
doubt, till I almost doubt what happened, did.
Chicken from Zabar's warms, and frozen spinach
simmers, while Iva writes a school essay:
"Both Sides: Everything has an opposite . . ."
sucking her inky fingers and her braid,
and I read Meredith, on your birthday.
"Why did Ray leave her pipe tobacco here
in the fridge?" Iva asks me while we're
rummaging for mustard and soy sauce
to mix with wine and baste the lamb. "Because
cold keeps it fresh." That isn't what she means,
we both know. I've explained, there were no scenes
or fights, really. We needed time to clear
the air, and think. What she was asking, was,
"Why did Ray leave
her stuff if she's not coming back?" She leans
to extremes, as I might well. String beans
to be sautéed with garlic; then I'll toss
the salad; then we'll eat. (Like menopause
it comes in flashes, more or less severe:
why did you leave?)
"Now that you know you can, the city's full
of girls-just notice them! It's not like pull-
ing teeth to flirt," she said, "or make a date."
It's quite like pulling teeth to masturbate
(I didn't say), and so I don't. My nice
dreams are worse than nightmares. As my eyes
open, I know I am; that instant, feel
you with me, on me, in me, and you're not.
Now that you know
you don't know, fantasies are more like lies.
They don't fit when I try them on for size.
I guess I can, but can't imagine what
I'd do, with whom, tonight. It's much too late
or soon, so what's yours stays yours. It has until
now. That, you know.
Who would divorce her lover with a phone
call? You did. Like that, it's finished, done-
or is for you. I'm left with closets of
grief (you moved out your things next day). I love
you. I want to make the phone call this
time, say, pack your axe, cab uptown, kiss
me, lots. I'll run a bubble bath; we'll sing
in the tub. We worked for love, loved it. Don't sling
that out with Friday's beer cans, or file-card it
in a drawer of anecdotes: "My Last
Six Girlfriends: How a Girl Acquires a Past."
I've got "What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted"
run on a loop, unwanted leitmotif.
Lust, light, love, life all tumbled into grief.
You closed us off like a parenthesis
and left me knowing just enough to miss.
"Anyone who (I did) ran down Broadway
screaming, or dropped in Bryant Park in a faint
similarly provoked, will sniff a taint
of self-aggrandizement in the assured way
you say: so be it; then she cut the cord; hey,
the young are like that. Put yourself on main-
tenance, stoically, without more complaint?
Grown-ups, at least, will not rush to applaud. They
won't believe you." And he downed his Negroni.
Who wants to know how loss and sorrow hit
me daily in the chest, how like a stone
this bread tastes? Even though lunch is on me,
he doesn't. Home alone is home, alone.
(I'd reach for Nightwood, but she "borrowed" it.)
Did you love well what very soon you left?
Come home and take me in your arms and take
away this stomach ache, headache, heartache.
Never so full, I never was bereft
so utterly. The winter evenings drift
dark to the window. Not one word will make
you, where you are, turn in your day, or wake
from your night toward me. The only gift
I got to keep or give is what I've cried,
floodgates let down to mourning for the dead
chances, for the end of being young,
for everyone I loved who really died.
I drank our one year out in brine instead
of honey from the seasons of your tongue.