Scars on Paper
An unwrapped icon, too potent to touch,
she freed my breasts from the camp Empire dress.
Now one of them's the shadow of a breast
with a lost object's half-life, with as much
life as an anecdotal photograph:
me, Kim and Iva, all stripped to the waist,
hiking near Russian River on June first
'79: Iva's five-and-a-half.
While she was almost twenty, wearing black
T-shirts in D.C., where we hadn't met.
You lay your palm, my love, on my flat chest.
In lines alive with what is not regret,
she takes her own path past, doesn't turn back.
Persistently, on paper, we exist.
Persistently, on paper, we exist.
You'd touch me if you could, but you're, in fact,
three thousand miles away. And my intact
body is eighteen months paper: the past
a fragile eighteen months regime of trust
in slash-and-burn, in vitamin pills, backed
by no statistics. Each day I enact
survivor's rituals, blessing the crust
I tear from the warm loaf, blessing the hours
in which I didn't or in which I did
consider my own death. I am not yet
statistically a survivor (that
is sixty months). On paper, someone flowers
and flares alive. I knew her. But she's dead.
She flares alive. I knew her. But she's dead.
I flirted with her, might have been her friend,
but transatlantic schedules intervened.
She wrote a book about her Freedom Ride,
the wary elders whom she taught to read,
— herself half-British, twenty-six, white-blonde,
with thirty years to live.
And I happened
to open up The Nation to that bad
news which I otherwise might not have known
(not breast cancer: cancer of the brain).
Words take the absent friend away again.
Alone, I think, she called, alone, upon
her courage, tried in ways she'd not have wished
by pain and fear: her courage, extinguished.
The pain and fear some courage extinguished
at disaster's denouement come back
daily, banal: is that brownish-black
mole the next chapter? Was the ache enmeshed
between my chest and armpit when I washed
rogue cells' new claw, or just a muscle ache?
I'm not yet desperate enough to take
comfort in being predeceased: the anguish
when the Harlem doctor, the Jewish dancer,
die of AIDS, the Boston seminary's
dean succumbs "after brief illness" to cancer.
I like mossed slabs in country cemeteries
with wide-paced dates, candles in jars, whose tallow
glows on summer evenings, desk-lamp yellow.
Aglow in summer evening, a desk-lamp's yellow
moonlight peruses notebooks, houseplants, texts,
while an aging woman thinks of sex
in the present tense. Desire may follow,
urgent or elegant, cut raw or mellow
with wine and ripe black figs: a proof, the next
course, a simple question, the complex
response, a burning sweetness she will swallow.
The opening mind is sexual and ready
to embrace, incarnate in its prime.
Rippling concentrically from summer's gold
disc, desire's iris expands, steady
with blood beat. Each time implies the next time.
The aging woman hopes she will grow old.
The aging woman hopes she will grow old.
A younger woman has a dazzling vision
of bleeding wrists, her own, the clean incisions
suddenly there, two open mouths. They told
their speechless secrets, witnesses not called
to what occurred with as little volition
of hers as these phantom wounds.
Intense precision
of scars, in flesh, in spirit. I'm enrolled
by mine in ranks where now I'm "being brave"
if I take off my shirt in a hot crowd
sunbathing, or demonstrating for Dyke Pride.
Her bravery counters the kitchen knives'
insinuation that the scars be made.
With, or despite our scars, we stay alive.
"With, or despite our scars, we stayed alive
until the Contras or the Government
or rebel troops came, until we were sent
to 'relocation camps' until the archives
burned, until we dug the ditch, the grave
beside the aspen grove where adolescent
boys used to cut class, until we went
to the precinct house, eager to behave
like citizens..."
I count my hours and days,
finger for luck the word-scarred table which
is not my witness, shares all innocent
objects' silence: a tin plate, a basement
door, a spade, barbed wire, a ring of keys,
an unwrapped icon, too potent to touch.
Literary Analysis
This literary analysis was generated with AI and may contain interpretive differences. Provide your analysis in the comments section.
Summary
Marilyn Hacker's poem moves between intimate memory, bodily self-scrutiny, and public loss, tracing a mind that cannot separate private life from the historical moment in which it lives. The poem begins with the physical fact of a changed body and a remembered touch, then widens into a network of women, lovers, friends, and political survivors whose lives have been shaped by illness, distance, and violence. What gives the poem its force is the way it refuses to let any one version of identity stay fixed: the body is both present and altered, desire is both still alive and shadowed by fear, and memory is both consolation and pain.
The progression is cumulative and unsettled. Each stanza revises what came before, moving from erotic memory to the statistics and rituals of survival, then into grief for women lost to cancer, AIDS, and political terror. The repeated assertion that people "persist" on paper becomes both reassurance and criticism: writing preserves the dead and the endangered, yet it also exposes how fragile lived existence is. By the end, the poem turns to silent objects, archives, and ruins, suggesting that history itself may be all that remains when bodies, homes, and records are damaged or destroyed. The central tension lies in whether language can truly honor survival, or only name the scars that survival leaves behind.
Theme
- Bodily survival and bodily change - The poem centers on a body altered by illness, surgery, and age, treating flesh as something that can be damaged yet still remain intensely alive.
- Memory as a form of persistence - Recalled scenes, names, and written records keep the dead and distant present, but the poem also shows how memory can reopen grief.
- Desire and aging - Erotic feeling does not disappear with age; instead, it becomes more complicated, joining pleasure, vulnerability, and the wish to keep living.
- Illness, fear, and vulnerability - Cancer, suicide, and AIDS hover over the poem as reminders that the body can become a site of dread and uncertainty.
- Women's lives and queer intimacy - The poem honors women's friendships, love, and shared history, placing lesbian and feminist experience at its emotional center.
- History and political violence - References to camps, wars, displacement, and archives burning connect personal suffering to broader forms of social and political destruction.
Literary Devices
- Repetition - Repeated lines and phrases create a refrain-like structure that emphasizes endurance while also suggesting the compulsive return of memory and trauma.
- Enjambment - Sentences spill across line breaks, mirroring the way thought moves restlessly from body to memory to political history without clean separation.
- Metaphor - The body is rendered through figures such as shadow, half-life, and paper, turning physical experience into a language of fragility and record.
- Allusion - References to magazines, political struggles, and survival statistics place the poem in a broader cultural world beyond the intimate scene.
- Juxtaposition - Tender erotic recollection appears beside illness, death, and public catastrophe, sharpening the emotional pressure of each.
- Imagery - Concrete details such as bread crust, candles, notebooks, and barbed wire ground the poem's abstractions in tactile reality.
- Paradox - The poem repeatedly holds opposites together, such as being alive on paper while facing mortality in the body.
- Free verse - The loose form allows the poem to shift between lyric intimacy, meditation, and witness without the restraint of a fixed meter.
Symbolism
- Paper - Suggests both writing and frailty: the page preserves experience, yet it also implies how thin and vulnerable survival can be.
- Scars - Represent both physical damage and the lasting marks left by illness, fear, and political violence.
- Breast - Stands for sexuality, identity, femininity, and the changing body, especially under the pressure of cancer and touch.
- Table - Functions as a domestic surface that also becomes a silent witness to memory, daily life, and loss.
- Keys - Suggest access, control, and the fragile possibility of holding onto a place or a past that can otherwise be taken away.
- Barbed wire - Evokes confinement, imprisonment, and the harsh systems that reduce lives to damage and displacement.
Tone
Hacker's tone is intimate, alert, and unsentimental, moving with clear-eyed tenderness through desire, grief, and self-surveillance. Even when the poem is most vulnerable, it resists melodrama; the voice keeps measuring, remembering, and revising. For the reader, the mood is aching and reflective, but also quietly defiant, because the poem keeps insisting on continued presence even when the body or history seems designed to erase it.
Historical Context
The poem belongs to late twentieth-century feminist and lesbian poetry, where the body is often treated as a site of personal truth and political meaning at once. It also reflects the cultural shadow of the AIDS crisis, cancer, and the wider vocabulary of survival that shaped writing from this period, especially among queer communities and women writers attentive to illness, caregiving, and loss.
Its references to archives, relocation camps, political violence, and named public losses place private grief inside a broader historical landscape of displacement and social catastrophe. The poem's concern with what gets recorded, remembered, or burned fits a period when many writers were asking who gets to remain visible in official history and who survives only through testimony, letters, books, and poems.