Rachel Hadas

Sing now the heavy furniture of the fall, the journey’s ending. Strong Aeneas bears deep on his shoulders all the dark wood chairs and tables of destruction. Bruising, blunt, they force his feet on up the war-scraped hills past raped dead temples. All Achilles kills litters the trail of sofa legs with other endings of houses. Further up, gods sit changing their own upholsteries of deceit, ordaining shelves and benches as the goal of his dim voyage. Sometimes arrows drawn on chair backs point the way they must go on, signs that some corridor of destiny is reserving him a threshold. Aeneas weeps at wind or passion, but steadfastly keeps carrying battered merchandise marked ROME in one direction, pondering it all.

Sweet smell of phlox drifting across the lawn— an early warning of the end of summer. August is fading fast, and by September the little purple flowers will all be gone. Season, project, and vacation done. One more year in everybody’s life. Add a notch to the old hunting knife Time keeps testing with a horny thumb. Over the summer months hung an unspoken aura of urgency. In late July galactic pulsings filled the midnight sky like silent screaming, so that, strangely woken, we looked at one another in the dark, then at the milky magical debris arcing across, dwarfing our meek mortality. There were two ways to live: get on with work, redeem the time, ignore the imminence of cataclysm; or else take it slow, be as tranquil as the neighbors’ cow we love to tickle through the barbed wire fence (she paces through her days in massive innocence, or, seeing green pastures, we imagine so). In fact, not being cows, we have no choice. Summer or winter, country, city, we are prisoners from the start and automatically, hemmed in, harangued by the one clamorous voice. Not light but language shocks us out of sleep ideas of doom transformed to meteors we translate back to portents of the wars looming above the nervous watch we keep.

A Greek I worked for once would always say that tragedies which still appall and thrill happen daily on a village scale. Except that he put it the other way: dark doings in the sleepiest small town loom dire and histrionic as a play. Cosmic? Perhaps. Unprecedented? Not to the old women sitting in the sun, the old men planted in cafes till noon or midnight taking in the human scene, connoisseurs of past-passing-and-to-come. These watchers locate in their repertory mythic fragments of some kindred story and draw them dripping out of memory’s well. Incest and adultery; exile and murder; divine punishment; disgrace: the trick is to locate the right-sized piece of the vast puzzle-patterned tapestry from which one ripped-out patch makes tragedy. This highly skilled and patient process—find a larger context, match and patch and mend— is what the chorus in Greek tragedy has always done. And to this very day spectators comb the tangles of a tale, compare, remember, comment—not ideal, but middle-aged or older, and alert. Beyond the hero’s rashness or the hurt heart of the heroine, they’ve reached the age when only stars still lust for center stage. The chorus, at a point midway between the limelight and the audience, is seen and unseen. Lady chaperones at balls once sat on brittle chairs against the walls. “My dancing days are over,” they’d both sigh and smile. Or take the case of poetry. Mine used to play the heroine—me me me— but lately, having had its fill of “I,” tries to discern, despite its vision’s flaws, a shape. A piece of myth. A pattern. Laws.