Names. Places. Families, stories, from news reports, fathers and daughters and mothers and sisters and wives. Husbands. Read. The A’s alone take up six screens.
There is a cure for love. It is absence. There is a cure
for grief. (It is absence.) I cannot say
you died, and I don’t want to live today.
I fed my child. I learned to drive a car.
I went to work. The baby is in bed.
This is a formula I used before.
(I ate a veal chop.) Word, word, word: the cure
for hard nights. Somebody was always dead,
but not, certainly, you. You rattled speed-
ing, seven-thirty, through the door.
awash with daffodils. Did I stay
up all night drawing the bowl of fruit? I did.
And then we went to bed and slept till four.
You kept the drawing when I went away.
–Marilyn Hacker, “Geographer”
A.