Interval
Attention fraying
in late afternoon light, soon
day will be done, not
the work incumbent on it
—whatever that might have been—
Gnarls of an old text
in the other alphabet:
can I unknot them,
reweave mirror fabric of
liminal unravelings?
*
Liminal space where
exiles with dictionaries
lose themselves: barzakh,
Arabic isthmus, the span
from death to resurrection
in Farsi: limbo,
where Socrates murmurs to
unbaptized babies
in contrapuntal cognates,
they hear fardous, paradise.
Copyright © 2016 by Marilyn Hacker. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 2, 2016, by the Academy of American Poets.
“A Palestinian poet friend and I were discussing via email the meaning of the word barzakh in Arabic. We both thought it also sounded Persian. My Arabic dictionary gave me one sense, but the cosmopolitan and often wrongheaded Google translator did indeed suggest I also look under ‘Farsi,’ which gave a related but different meaning. Then a second friend, a Kurdish poet, added: the space between death and resurrection. Unraveling language is a redemptive liminal space.”
—Marilyn Hacker
Marilyn Hacker
Born in New York City on November 27, 1942, Marilyn Hacker was the only child of a working-class Jewish couple, each the first in their families to attend college. Hacker attended the Bronx High School of Science before enrolling at New York University, where she received a BA in Romance languages in 1964.