Rachel Hadas

THE PATTERN

On the train to the airport a little white dog peeps

from the tote bag in a woman’s lap.

Once you see the pattern, it recurs:

origin, journey, wound, and destination,

journey originating with the wound,

destination cycling back to journey.

Band-aid, crutches, cast, that little dog:

wound we carry with us tenderly

journeying toward a cure. The destination

doubles as origin. A tall cupped candle

shines through two red hands. Interior threshold.

Journey. Crystal column. Origin.

Bath of silence where you wash your wound.

FIRST PERSONS

All those youthful outpourings featuring ‘we’:

To whom was I speaking?

Was ‘we’ no more than a gesture

Intending to demonstrate

That I came coupled,

That therefore I was desirable

And no sad solitary?

For whom was I speaking?

There must be other things to be than we.

And yet as one gets older

The ‘I’ fades too.

Even as the shadows of experience lengthen,

One’s core seems less substantial.

Those youthful poems that did not say ‘we’

Spoke as ‘I’ instead. But who is she?

I am not a forest nymph, a tree,

A sibyl or a goddess or a bird.

I am leaning toward transparency.

I hope to end as echo of a word.

PLUTARCH ON THE PLANE

I’m almost sure I hear

before we leave the ground

the man in the seat ahead of mine

enunciate the name

‘Plutarch’ on his cell phone.

Perhaps a classicist?

Possibly a professor

at the university

in the city we

are flying toward this January noon.

Maybe he knew my brother,

who taught here. Maybe he

studied in his youth

with my Plutarch-loving father.

Nothing would be more likely.

The world shrinks steadily,

or time, turned palpable,

pulls people toward each other.

As we file down the aisle,

I could easily speak to him.

Feebly or discreetly

or for some other reason,

I let the moment go,

and we get off the plane.

JonArno Lawson

THE ROOM THEY HADN’T LEFT FOR HER

  

They kept counting her out

it seemed inconvenient to credit her

it wasn’t really

but they’d invested in the notion

that there wasn’t room for her

there was room

but they’d painted themselves into a corner

in which there was no room for her

they hadn’t even used real paint

the paint was imaginary

but the corner where they found themselves was real

though it wasn’t really

an inescapable corner

it just felt that way,

apparently

they felt cornered, they said

and it felt bad – here I’m quoting them –

‘We’re in a tight corner!’

what they hadn’t counted on was 

it being for nothing – she was gone

as soon as they started imagining they were running

out of room

because that’s when she lost interest,

and left the room

they hadn’t left for her.

 

 

 

 

ELEPHANTS

 

He brought a small ceramic elephant

because he knew the man’s wife collected elephants.

She was dead. He knew that, but somehow hadn’t taken it into account.

The widowed husband was deeply disturbed by the new elephant.

How could he welcome a new elephant into his dead wife’s collection?

Any collection of trinkets like this is fated to be incomplete,

but the moment the trinket-collector dies, the collection is finished.

The guest saw at once that he’d made a mistake.

And even why it was a mistake.

But it was too late. The man himself was hard to get a gift for.

What were his interests? It wasn't clear. But the wife, now dead,

had a clear interest in elephants.

The man’s girlfriend, who had in fact been a friend of the wife’s, tried to salvage

the situation. She knew the gift giver had meant no harm.

He could not even be described as insensitive.

The new elephant created an unbearable tension.

It could not be gotten rid of, or accepted.

The girlfriend picked up the elephant, and carried it to the kitchen, away from

the other elephants while saying ‘How thoughtful of you! How very thoughtful!’.

And this took it out of sight, and at the same time acknowledged it, and

somehow it captured the fact that the gift giver was in fact thoughtful, though

he’d made a foolish mistake.

There was palpable relief at that part of the evening being over,

though not even a minute had passed. The relief evaporated quickly as if

everyone seemed to become aware that the elephant was an omen of something worse still

on its way,

and the evening had only just begun.

 

 

FLOWERS

 

Faded flowers in a fist

Twisted face that won’t untwist

soberly knotted       

wildly tangled

the living will leap

and the dead be dangled.

  

 

BY THE WAY

 

Words came very far without you and this

 

by the way

 

is why you must weigh the words

in the way you weigh the way

the way that has weight

so it can sustain you

and the words you want

to entertain you

must carry such freight

so that you can remain you.

About the Poets

Rachel Hadas is the author of numerous books of poetry, essays, and translations, including Poems for Camilla (Measure 2018), Questions in the Vestibule: Poems (Triquarterly, 2016);The River of Forgetfulness (Wordtech Communications, 2006), and Halfway Down the Hall: New & Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1998). Poems published in The Golden Road (Northwestern University Press, 2012)

JonArno Lawson is the author of The Playgrounds of Babel (Groundwood, 2019), Over the Rooftops, Under the Moon (Enchanted Lion, 2019), But It’s So Silly: A Cross-cultural Collage of Nonsense, Play, and Poetry (Wolsak and Wynn, 2017), Sidewalk Flowers (Groundwood, 2015), Enjoy it While it Hurts (Wolsak and Wynn, 2013), and other books of poetry and essays for adults and children.