monday poem #272: Marilyn Hacker, "Paragraph"
Part of what's so heartbreaking about this poem is the way that Hacker, who has as much control over blank verse as any living poet I can think of, begins it in iambic pentameter and then lets the lines stop short or tip out of meter, recovers, and then loses the meter again, as grief itself sometimes catches us off guard.
Paragraph
Another morning opens up its hand
on loss and possibility at once.
Your face is wrinkled. The blank page is lined.
A year turned over in its furrows; months
narrowed the light, which now has widened
three weeks past solstice, lengthening beyond
the cloudbank or the elegy,
the unlucky anniversary.
The father who outlived his daughter writes
something about the snow
which covered the cow pasture in last night's
sub-zero freeze. The four-New-Year's-ago
manuscript's a book-cold as a monument, the daughter
who outlived her father thinks. Outside her study window
blackbirds preen on iridescent water.
- Marilyn Hacker
from Names
Originally posted at Dreamwidth || Read
comments on Dreamwidth
Paragraph
Another morning opens up its hand
on loss and possibility at once.
Your face is wrinkled. The blank page is lined.
A year turned over in its furrows; months
narrowed the light, which now has widened
three weeks past solstice, lengthening beyond
the cloudbank or the elegy,
the unlucky anniversary.
The father who outlived his daughter writes
something about the snow
which covered the cow pasture in last night's
sub-zero freeze. The four-New-Year's-ago
manuscript's a book-cold as a monument, the daughter
who outlived her father thinks. Outside her study window
blackbirds preen on iridescent water.
- Marilyn Hacker
from Names
Originally posted at Dreamwidth || Read
comments on Dreamwidth