by Marilyn Hacker-Fall 2001(Sestina)
It's a long way from the bedroom to the kitchen
When all the thought in back of thought is loss
How wide the dark rooms are
You walk across with a glass of water and a migraine tablet
Sweat of hard dreams, unforgiven silences missed opportunities
The night progresses like chronic disease, symptom by symptom, sentences without pardon
It's only half past two, you realize five
windows are still lit across the street. You wonder:
Did you tell as many lies as it now appears were told to you?
and if you told them, how did you not know they were lies? Did you know,
and then forget?
There were lies. Did you know, and then forget if there was a lie in the peach orchard?
There was the lie a saxophone riffed on a storm-thick summer sky. There was the lie on a
postcard. There was the lie {lying} thought and suggested. There was the lie that lay slack in the blue lap of a September
day, there was the lie in bed
There was the lie that caught its breath- when it came,
There was the lie........ that wept
There was the lie that read the newspaper
There was the lie that fell asleep,its clear face relaxing back to the face of a child. There
was the lie held while you both slept
A lie hung framed in the doorway, growing wild.
The face framed in the doorframe is a wild card now, mouth could eat silence,mouth could
speak the indigestible
Eyes,oh tourmaline, a crack in the glass, break the glass
Down a green-tiled corridor double doors open
Who was wheeled through, hallucinating on a gurney, weak with relief as muscle and nerve
flickered awake
While a dreamed face framed in a doorframe openned and smiled.
Precisely, no one's home
No dog will come and smile, the black- gummed smile he shares with wolves
The empty doorframe frames an empty room whose dim fluorescence is perpetual.
The double doors close back upon themselves.
The double doors close back upon themselves
The watcher from the woods rejoins the pack
Shadows on branches, steely lacework, black on black, dark ornaments, dark wooden shelves
Fever wolves , guardians a lamp dissolves in pitiless logic, as an insominiac waits to hear
the long night crack and break into contaminated rusty halves(leaves)
This is the ninety-seventh(count out) night watch in
the underbrush of hours, closed on you, since a lie
Split open like a rotten fruit.
A metal band around your head begins to tighten; pain shutters your eyes,......like too much
light
It's a long way from the bedroom to the kitchen
