{ Marilyn Hacker: An Essay on Departures. }

[delga]

An Essay on Departures
by Marilyn Hacker

And when you leave, and no one's left behind,
do you leave a cluttered room, a window framing
a zinc roof, other mansard windows? Do you
leave a row of sycamores, a river
that flows in your nocturnal pulse, a moon
sailing late-risen through clouds silvered by
the lights flung up from bridges? Do you leave
the wicker chairs the café owner stacks
at half-past-midnight while the last small clutch
of two girls and a boy smoke and discuss
what twenty-year-olds in cafés discuss
past midnight, with no war on here? You leave
the one and then the other, the all-night
eight-aisles-of-sundries with a pharmacy
cloned six times in one mile on upper Broadway.
Everywhere you're leaving something, leaving
no one, leaving as a season fades,
leaving the crisp anticipation of
the new, before its gold drops on the rain-
slick crossings to the walkways over bridges,
the schoolyard's newly painted porte-cochère:
remembered details. You're no longer there.
What's left when you have left, when what is left is
coins on the table and an empty cup?
An August lapse begins; the shutters drop
and lock, whatever follows is conjecture.
The sound feels final, punitive, a trap
shutting its jaws, though when the selfsame structure
was rolled up mornings, it was hopeful noise,
a reprieve from insomnia, a day's
presence opening possibility.
As you leave the place, you bring the time
you spent there to a closed parenthesis.
Now it is part of that amorphous past
parceled into flashes, slide-vignettes.
You'll never know if just what you forget's
the numinous and right detail, the key—
but to a door that is no longer yours,
glimpse of a morning-lit interior's
awakening silhouette, with the good blue
sky reflected on the tall blue walls,
then shadow swallows what was/wasn't true,
shutters the windows, sheathes the shelves in dust,
retains a sour taste and discards the kiss,
clings to the mood stripped of its narrative.
You take the present tense along. The place
you're leaving stops, dissolves into a past
in which it may have been, or it may not
have been (corroborate, but it's still gone)
the place you were, the moment that you leave.