"Crepuscule with Muriel" by Marilyn Hacker

From POL: "Although a traditionalist in form, Marilyn Hacker’s poetry employs contemporary speech and themes. Hacker splits her time between Paris and her native New York City."

Key terms: free verse, alliteration, consonance, assonance, personification

Crepuscule with Muriel

Instead of a cup of tea, instead of a milk-
silk whelk of a cup, of a cup of nearly six
o'clock teatime, cup of a stumbling block,
cup of an afternoon unredeemed by talk,
cup of a cut brown loaf, of a slice, a lack
of butter, blueberry jam that's almost black,
instead of tannin seeping into the cracks
of a pot, the void of an hour seeps out, infects
the slit of a cut I haven't the wit to fix
with a surgeon's needle threaded with fine-gauge silk
as a key would thread the cylinder of a lock.
But no key threads the cylinder of a lock.
Late afternoon light, transitory, licks
the place of the absent cup with its rough tongue, flicks
itself out beneath the wheel's revolving spoke.
Taut thought's gone, with a blink of attention, slack,
a vision of "death and distance in the mix"
(she lost her words and how did she get them back
when the corridor of a day was a lurching deck?
The dream-life logic encodes in nervous tics
she translated to a syntax which connects
intense and unfashionable politics
with morning coffee, Hudson sunsets, sex;
then the short-circuit of the final stroke,
the end toward which all lines looped out, then broke).
What a gaze out the window interjects:
on the southeast corner, a black Lab balks,
tugged as the light clicks green toward a late-day walk
by a plump brown girl in a purple anorak.
The Bronx-bound local comes rumbling up the tracks
out of the tunnel, over west Harlem blocks
whose windows gleam on the animal warmth of bricks
rouged by the fluvial light of six o'clock.

This poem, though difficult to decipher in many ways, is a lesson in diction and imagery. The poet begins with parallelism - "Instead of..." and throughout she messes with alliteration and rhyme: "butter, blueberry jam that's almost black, / instead of tannin seeping into the cracks." There is a fascinating use of personification and even consonance here: "Late afternoon light, transitory, licks / the place of the absent cup with its rough tongue." It is clear that the word choice in this poem was very particular and that there is meaning to be found. In first hour, we discussed the possibility that the narrator is used to having tea with Muriel, but perhaps the "crepuscule" (def. twilight) represents Muriel's death and the narrator is dealing with no longer having a companion. It is also possible that the narrator is describing a tea date with Muriel that is simply happening at twilight, or that the twilight somehow represents the tea that they have together. This is a perfect example of poetry being open to interpretation - but the tools are there to support the interpretation. This would also be an excellent poem to try and read aloud because of the intricate diction.

http://www.poetryoutloud.org/poem/180962