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Respite in a Minor Key

I would like an unbroken stretch of drizzly weekday afternoons, in a moulting season: nowhere else to go but across the street for bread, and the paper.

Later, faces, voices across a table, or an autumn fricassee, cèpes and shallots, sipping Gigandas as I dice and hum to Charpentier's vespers.

No one's waiting for me across an ocean. What I can't understand or change is distant. War is a debate, or at worst, a headlined nightmare. But waking

it will be there still, and one morning closer to my implication in what I never chose, elected, as my natal sky rains down civilian ashes.

Marilyn Hacker

October 18, 2001

I would like an unbroken stretch of drizzly weekday afternoons, in a moulting season: nowhere else to go but across the street for bread, and the paper.

Later, faces, voices across a table, or an autumn fricassee, cèpes and shallots, sipping Gigandas as I dice and hum to Charpentier’s vespers.

No one’s waiting for me across an ocean. What I can’t understand or change is distant. War is a debate, or at worst, a headlined nightmare. But waking

it will be there still, and one morning closer to my implication in what I never chose, elected, as my natal sky rains down civilian ashes.

Marilyn Hacker


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