Poem-A-Day: Headaches by Marilyn Hacker

December 10, 2013 Headaches by Marilyn Hacker Wine again. The downside of any evening's  bright exchanges, scribbled with retribution :  stark awake, a tic throbs in the left temple's  site of bombardment.    Tortured syntax, thorned thoughts, vocabulary  like a forest littered with unexploded  cluster bombs, no exit except explosion  ripping the branches.    Stacks of shadowed books on the bedside table  wall a jar of Tiger Balm. You grope for its  glass netsuke hexagon. Tic stabs, dull pain  supercedes voices,    stills obsessive one-sided conversations.  Turn from mouths you never will kiss, a neck your fingers will not trace to a golden shoulder.  Think of your elders --    If, in fact, they'd died, the interlocutors  who, alive, recede into incoherence,  you would write the elegy, feel clean grief, still  asking them questions    -- though you know it's you who'd provide the answers. Auden's « Old People"s Home », Larkin's « The Old  Fools »  are what come to mind, not Yeats. In a not-so  distant past, someone    poured a glass of wine at three in the morning,  laid a foolscap pad on the kitchen table,  mind aspark from the long loquacious dinner  two hours behind her,    and you got a postcard (a Fifties jazz club)  next day across town, where she scrawled she'd found  the  tail-end of a good Sancerre in the fridge and  finished the chapter.    Now she barely knows her friends when you visit.  Drill and mallet work on your forehead. Basta!  And it is Màrgaret you mourn for.. Get up,  go to the bathroom.    You take the drugs. Synapses buzz and click.  You turn the bed lamp on, open a book : vasoconstrictor and barbiturate  make words in oval light reverberate.  The sky begins to pale at five o'clock.        Copyright © 2013 by Marilyn Hacker. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem "Anyone who has migraines or even tension headaches knows the spiral of disastrous thoughts that accompany them. But it doesn't take a headache to magnify the difficult confrontation of the loss that sometimes seems worse than a death, when your personal exemplars of the generation-that-went-before can no longer guide, advise, or comfort." --Marilyn Hacker Most Recent Book by Hacker Names (W. W. Norton, 2011)    Poem-A-Day Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-A-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Browse the Poem-A-Day Archive.    Marilyn Hacker is the author of numerous books of poems, including Names (W. W. Norton, 2011). She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and lives in Paris.  Related Poems Slight Tremor by Linda Gregerson The Tongue by Chris Martin  the lost baby poem by Lucille Clifton __________________________ Love reading Poem-A-Day? Help support it today.     Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.

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