Lynda Hull, Magical thinking

Fotografía de Miwa Yanagi

MAGICAL THINKING

A woman, after an absence of many years, returns

     to her old neighborhood and finds it a little more

         burned, more abandoned. Through rooftop aerials

the stadium’s still visible where the boys of summer

     spun across the diamond and some nights she’d hear

         strikes and pop flies called through the open windows

of the rooms she shared with a man she thought

     she loved. All that summer, she watched

         across the street the magician’s idiot son

paint over and over the Magic & Costume Shop’s

     intricate portico — all frets and scallops, details

         from another century. The more he painted though

the more his sheer purity of attention seemed

     to judge her own life as frayed somehow and wrong.

         Daily the son worked until the city swerved

toward night’s dizzy carnival with moons

     and swans afloat in neon over the streets.

         One evening she saw the magician’s trick bouquet

flower at the curb while he filled his car.

     He folded the multicolored scarves, then

         caged the fabulous disappearing pigeons.

It is a common human longing to want utterly

     to vanish from one life and arrive transformed

         in another. When the man came home, he’d

touch her shoulders, her neck, but each touch

     discovered only the borders of her solitude.

         As a child in that neighborhood she’d believed

people were hollow and filled with quiet music, that

     if she were hurt deeply enough she would break

         and leave only a blue scroll of notes.

At first when he hit her, her face burned.

     Far off the stadium lights crossed the cool

         green diamond and burnished cobwebs swaying

on the ceiling. Then she became invisible,

     so when the doctor leaned over and asked

         her name all she could think of were her dresses

thrown from the window like peonies exploding

     to bloom in the clear dark air. No music —

         merely a rose haze through her lids, something

ticking in her head like a metronome

     in a parlor, dusty and arid with steam heat.

         How many lives she’d passed through to find

herself, an aging woman in black, before the locked

     and empty shop. So much sleight of hand, the years

         simply dissolving. Again she hears the crowd,

a billow of applause rippling across the brilliant

     diamond, across the mysterious passage

         of time and the failure of sorrow to pass away.

Lynda Hull

(Newark, NJ, 1954 - Plymouth, EE.UU., 1994)

de Collected Poems, Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 

Graywolf Poetry Re/View Series, 2006

Edición de Mark Doty y David Wojahn

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