[Newspoetry] Marilyn Hacker poem

[William Gillespie]

Can anybody figure out the rhyming scheme..?

Scars on Paper

    An unwrapped icon, too potent to touch,
    she freed my breasts from the camp Empire dress.
    Now one of them's the shadow of a breast
    with a lost object's half-life, with as much
    life as an anecdotal photograph:
    me, Kim and Iva, all stripped to the waist,
    hiking near Russian River on June first
    '79: Iva's five-and-a-half.
    While she was almost twenty, wearing black
    T-shirts in D.C., where we hadn't met.
    You lay your palm, my love, on my flat chest.
    In lines alive with what is not regret,
    she takes her own path past, doesn't turn back.
    Persistently, on paper, we exist.

    Persistently, on paper, we exist.
    You'd touch me if you could, but you're, in fact,
    three thousand miles away. And my intact
    body is eighteen months paper: the past
    a fragile eighteen months regime of trust
    in slash-and-burn, in vitamin pills, backed
    by no statistics. Each day I enact
    survivor's rituals, blessing the crust
    I tear from the warm loaf, blessing the hours
    in which I didn't or in which I did
    consider my own death. I am not yet
    statistically a survivor (that
    is sixty months). On paper, someone flowers
    and flares alive. I knew her. But she's dead.

    She flares alive. I knew her. But she's dead.
    I flirted with her, might have been her friend,
    but transatlantic schedules intervened.
    She wrote a book about her Freedom Ride,
    the wary elders whom she taught to read,
    — herself half-British, twenty-six, white-blonde,
    with thirty years to live.
                                       And I happened
    to open up The Nation to that bad
    news which I otherwise might not have known
    (not breast cancer: cancer of the brain).
    Words take the absent friend away again.
    Alone, I think, she called, alone, upon
    her courage, tried in ways she'd not have wished
    by pain and fear: her courage, extinguished.

    The pain and fear some courage extinguished
    at disaster's denouement come back
    daily, banal: is that brownish-black
    mole the next chapter? Was the ache enmeshed
    between my chest and armpit when I washed
    rogue cells' new claw, or just a muscle ache?
    I'm not yet desperate enough to take
    comfort in being predeceased: the anguish
    when the Harlem doctor, the Jewish dancer,
    die of AIDS, the Boston seminary's
    dean succumbs "after brief illness" to cancer.
    I like mossed slabs in country cemeteries
    with wide-paced dates, candles in jars, whose tallow
    glows on summer evenings, desk-lamp yellow.

    Aglow in summer evening, a desk-lamp's yellow
    moonlight peruses notebooks, houseplants, texts,
    while an aging woman thinks of sex
    in the present tense. Desire may follow,
    urgent or elegant, cut raw or mellow
    with wine and ripe black figs: a proof, the next
    course, a simple question, the complex
    response, a burning sweetness she will swallow.
    The opening mind is sexual and ready
    to embrace, incarnate in its prime.
    Rippling concentrically from summer's gold
    disc, desire's iris expands, steady
    with blood beat. Each time implies the next time.
    The aging woman hopes she will grow old.

    The aging woman hopes she will grow old.
    A younger woman has a dazzling vision
    of bleeding wrists, her own, the clean incisions
    suddenly there, two open mouths. They told
    their speechless secrets, witnesses not called
    to what occurred with as little volition
    of hers as these phantom wounds.
                                                      Intense precision
    of scars, in flesh, in spirit. I'm enrolled
    by mine in ranks where now I'm "being brave"
    if I take off my shirt in a hot crowd
    sunbathing, or demonstrating for Dyke Pride.
    Her bravery counters the kitchen knives'
    insinuation that the scars be made.
    With, or despite our scars, we stay alive.

    "With, or despite our scars, we stayed alive
    until the Contras or the Government
    or rebel troops came, until we were sent
    to 'relocation camps' until the archives
    burned, until we dug the ditch, the grave
    beside the aspen grove where adolescent
    boys used to cut class, until we went
    to the precinct house, eager to behave
    like citizens..."
                         I count my hours and days,
    finger for luck the word-scarred table which
    is not my witness, shares all innocent
    objects' silence: a tin plate, a basement
    door, a spade, barbed wire, a ring of keys,
    an unwrapped icon, too potent to touch.