Rachel Hadas

As if because you lay (deeply embarrassing) inside my body, I could (inconceivable) follow your swift thoughts into their blue immersion even now, stilettoes flickering, or schools of fish maneuvering, first clear and then occluded, though now and then a piercing gleam cuts through; as if the snow reflections that glaze the winter afternoon to porcelain could penetrate the secrets of a skull that happens to have lodged (improbable) inside me once. Your liberation twelve years ago today is the occasion you and your friends are celebrating now behind a door that’s firmly shut. The fantasy you’ve lately been devouring features an evil mage with hourglass eyes. Last week, when you were furious at me (I must have thrown some precious thing away), you swiftly slipped into your parents’ room and turned the bedside clock an hour ahead. Discovered as the culprit, wickedly you smiled. You knew time was my enemy.

Ida and Isidor Straus sleep side by side eternally in an Egyptian galley fronting their Woodlawn mausoleum. Symbolically they lie. Their boat is small; nor was her body recovered from the Titanic. And yet the image of the voyage holds. Why not embark? A river runs behind me on the other side of this dark window. A dream called Night Boat arranged us side by side in a black craft, sailing the river of forgetfulness until the stars went out. It was poetic license. I didn’t dream that boat. The boat was dream, and we were passengers balanced on the slippery cusp of daylight, unless you had already disembarked in some shadowy port, leaving me to sail along alone.

Call me the bee buzzing in the museum. The younger sister fussing through a house still stiff with loss. The meddling goblin in the mausoleum. My dream: with three in the front seat, we drive under a bridge and halt. A huge gray bus blocks the whole road, including us, the only travelers who are left alive. It’s drizzling; the windshield wiper blades busily gesture, yet we’re nearly blind. You two seem not to mind blank windows, pulled-down shades. I mind. I want to get out and explore, to move around the deathly obstacle. “Don’t make a sound,” you say. (Who are you?) “Don’t go near that door.” Our mountain drive last month—that wasn’t dreamed. We three again. We ran a dog down. I alone looked back, alone let out a cry. I saw it lying in its blood and screamed. So tell me what these images portend. Am I a noisy bird of evil omen or just a person, apprehensive, human, moving ahead, kid sister into woman, stonewalled by death each time she rounds a bend?

Return The taste is strong as ever, figs and cheese and wine. I recall each savor; the taste is strong as ever, even if it will never be quite so fresh again. The taste is strong as ever, figs and cheese and wine. Obverse Two sides of one coin love and worry seem. Both of them are mine: two sides of one coin, two links in one chain, left/right of one brain? Two sides of one coin love and worry seem. Metamorphosis Why does transformation sneak up on us so? In life, not just narration, why does transformation creep up—yes, in slow motion, inexorably, though? Why does transformation sneak up on us so? Technology Where are worry beads now people have cell phones clamped against their heads? Where are worry beads? Ancient human needs, new millennium; where are worry beads? People have cell phones. Fortress Before we reach the top, street sounds fade away. Many steep steps up before we reach the top; just when did they stop? Silence; scalding sky. Before we reach the top, street sounds fade away. Dactylic Tino's counting on his fingers. Syllables and rhyme; a faint Sapphic cadence lingers. Tino's counting on his fingers. Generations of singers keeping, conquering time. Tino's counting on his fingers; syllables and rhyme.

It has arrived—the long rag rug multiply folded. On top, one alien hair. I put my face to the folds and smell despair palpable as salt air in all those rooms and houses, small and smug— enclosures I passed through on my way where? Whoever did the weaving appears old in my mind’s eye. I can’t make out her face, can only conjure up the faintest trace of an abstracted grace, clack of the loom. Does she know they’ll be sold these precious things, in some unheard-of place? I perch her on a hill, precariously beyond the reach of waves’ daily boom. Sun blazes overhead, but her dim room (no bigger than the loom) is proof against the violence of the sky From it I further spin what I once called my home: Endless horizons fading into haze, the mornings dawn came up so rosy clear; snails in the garden, sheep bells everywhere, the brightness of the air, terraces, valleys organizing space and time’s cessation. So this package here I’m now unwrapping, in New York, today (rugs like rainbows, woven with a grace my strands of language barely can express; dishrags of dailiness dispersed and recombined and freshly gay) comes to me imbued with images, slowly and faithfully across the water, across the world. It represents a time I myself snipped and recombined as rhyme as soon as I went home, if that is where I am. These rugs recover the sense of stepping twice into a single river.

Lilacs look neon in fading light. Death makes life shine: a tiredness, a flickering between ages, which is each age; a piling up to tottering and falling back to sand. So much for cycle. The front door lock sticks each fall when we’re first back. We are advised to oil it. Olive oil in the keyhole: again the old key turns. Once again to meander along the edge of water, whether tideless sea or tidal river, pushing the stroller, dreaming oil in the lock; the key dipped in lubricity the boychild’s shining skin me tired to the bone

Saturday, April 5. Welles’s Othello: black and white grid of rage, steam of sheer fury spewing from the vent of violence that followed where they went. Wind howled on the battlements, but sun gilded glum canals. The lovers floated beneath black bridges, coupled in stone rooms. The unrepentant villain (at the start so all the rest was flashback) dangled from a cage squinting inscrutably at the funeral procession winding through the town below. The air was full of wailing. Knives of sunlight glittered on the sea. We lurched out onto Fifty-Seventh Street. You said “I think I’m dying.” Next week your eyes went out. Shining under the lamp, your blue gaze, now opaque, your face drawn sharper but still beautiful: from this extremity you can attempt to rise to rage and grief. Or you can yield to the cozy quicksand of the bed. You wave your hand at walls of books: “What do I do? Do I throw all these away?” Their anecdotes, their comforts—now black glass.

Stivenson Magloire Amidst the glossy dark green foliage of trees around the hotel pool, I spy a low-hanging golden fruit. So many trees whose names I do not know and for the first time do not care to learn. The overwhelming now in its countless inflections cancels vocabulary: eyes lips skin instead of words. Still in the pool, floating on my back as the sun gets low, I look at the mango, if that is what it is (I think it is some wholly other fruit), and suddenly smell garlic sautéed in butter. Chefs in the kitchen under the trees are getting the hors d’oeuvres ready. Yesterday in a dim, airless gallery, following your lead, I hunted down an iconography written in a grisly alphabet yet full of life, the haunting gaze direct, transcending death. Death had in winning lost. Art trumped death and life trumped art. Last night (our third together — sleep a whole new texture in a bed with you) I gave you space and found myself at the border of a far province in the king-sized bed, a dimly lit hinterland where paintings ruled, a region wholly devoted to the work of the same painter, mysteriously killed, stoned to death (“lapidated” was one word), assassinated — why? A mystery to be solved by iconography? Death had won but also death had lost. Garlic and butter. Glossy dark green leaves. Voices across the pool. A hanging fruit. An azure splash. And as the sun goes down, you sit by the window in our room, drawing pictures of this this this time. What to call it? Colors in your hands trump words. Like the fruit, like the solution to the mystery, something I am at a loss to name.

Down milk-bright colonnades the leper’s bell recedes. Shades lowered against the gleaming waste of ice, I sit back, bathe in lukewarm acquiescence. Dutiful, prompt, strapped, doped, a little drunk, squinting at international afternoon I’ll soon pass GO again. And if these colored pencils, nose drops, passport should plummet with the rest of the huge oval, giant time capsule soft for the shark’s maw, will a notebook ambered back to front with words rescue me from oblivion? Syrup of skittish travelers, fame. I yawn.

Doomed beauties, my companions, my familiars, your long arms braceleted with snakes of danger, a questions twines in all the undergrowth. How can we tell the living from the dead? Puvis de Chavanne’s tall pearly figures dressed as sturdy Spartans at the chase turn out to be pale paper dolls in space. And how can we be sure that we’re alive? Our bodies, aging, changing, slow and stiffen. On flesh if not yet quite inert increasingly opaque, bite or bruise or blemish pose the questions Where have you been? What have you been doing? My sister’s leg, scaled by a manic cat nearly three years ago, still is scored and punctured. Last September I picked blackberries bare-armed; here are the scratches ten weeks later. We are passing through the world. This is some of what it does to us.