Headaches

Headaches

Marilyn Hacker, 1942

Wine again. The downside of any evening’s

bright exchanges, scribbled with retribution :

stark awake, a tic throbs in the left temple’s

site of bombardment.

Tortured syntax, thorned thoughts, vocabulary

like a forest littered with unexploded

cluster bombs, no exit except explosion

ripping the branches. 

Stacks of shadowed books on the bedside table

wall a jar of Tiger Balm. You grope for its

glass netsuke hexagon. Tic stabs, dull pain 

supercedes voices,

stills obsessive one-sided conversations.

Turn from mouths you never will kiss, a neck your

fingers will not trace to a golden shoulder.

Think of your elders —

If, in fact, they’d died, the interlocutors

who, alive, recede into incoherence, 

you would write the elegy, feel clean grief, still

asking them questions

— though you know it’s you who’d provide the answers.

Auden’s Old People”s Home, Larkin’s The Old Fools

are what come to mind, not Yeats.  In a not-so

distant past, someone  

poured a glass of wine at three in the morning,

laid a foolscap pad on the kitchen table,

mind aspark from the long loquacious dinner

two hours behind her,

and you got a postcard (a Fifties jazz club) 

next day across town, where she scrawled she’d found the

tail-end of a good Sancerre in the fridge and

finished the chapter. 

Now she barely knows her friends when you visit.

Drill and mallet work on your forehead. Basta!

And it is Màrgaret you mourn for..  Get up, 

go to the bathroom. 

You take the drugs. Synapses buzz and click.

You turn the bed lamp on, open a book :

vasoconstrictor and barbiturate 

make words in oval light reverberate.

The sky begins to pale at five o’clock. 

Since this tooth began to ache, I have been having pretty awful headaches.  They come and go, but when they come they come with a vengeance.  There are a lot of parts of this poem that speak to how I feel with a headache.