#MIDDLEBURY
Interval
Marilyn Hacker
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.
About this poem
“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
About Marilyn Hacker
Marilyn Hacker is the author of “A Stranger’s Mirror: New and Selected Poems 1995-2014” (W.W. Norton, 2015), as well as the translator of Emmanuel Moses’ “Preludes and Fugues” (Oberlin College Press, 2016), from the French. She lives in Paris.
The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day@poets.org.
(c) 2016 Marilyn Hacker. Used with permission. Originally published in Poem-a-Day, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate.
