Indelible

by Hadas, Rachel

• ISBN13: 9780819564405
• ISBN10: 0819564400
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-10-30
• Publisher: Wesleyan Univ Pr

Summary

The title, Indelible, refers to the enduring marks of time's passage. Accordingly, the poems in this thematically resonant and tightly unified collection trace the ways family, art (particularly literature), elegy and dreams color and shape one another. The poems in Indelible pick up thematic threads from her earlier poetry with a new perspective, and new stylistic features such as prose and prose-like poems, but with all of the hallmarks Hadas' readers have come to expect: fine-honed style; human and very accessible subject matter; lyric beauty and formal control.

Author Biography

Rachel Hadas is a poet, translator, essayist, critic, and much of her work is influenced by her love of classics. Her books include Halfway Down the Hall: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan, 1998), The Empty Bed (Wesleyan, 1995), and A Son from Sleep (Wesleyan, 1987). She has led creative writing workshops at the Gay Men's Health Alliance in New York for over ten years, and her own poems on the AIDS crisis have been lauded as being among the best elegies of our time. A Professor of English at Rutgers University, Hadas lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	vii
I
Thick and Thin	3	(1)
Samian Morning, 1971	4	(2)
Ghost Jam	6	(2)
Deja Vu	8	(1)
The Last Time	9	(1)
The Caravan	10	(2)
Mourning's Dichotomy	12	(1)
Around Lake Erie and Across the Hudson	13	(2)
The Glass of Milk	15	(1)
Mud Season	16	(1)
The Week After Easter: Heaven's Gate	17	(2)
Dream Houses	19	(3)
The Banquet	22	(4)
Humble Herb Is Rival to Prozac	26	(3)
Motherless Fall	29	(3)
The Lost House	32	(1)
In the Grove	33	(2)
The Letter	35	(8)
II
Helen Variations	43	(6)
Pomergranate Variations	49	(6)
Change Is the Stranger	55	(6)
III
The Genre Clerk	61	(1)
Four Short Stories	62	(2)
The Costume Chest	64	(2)
Props	66	(1)
Homage to Winslow Homer	67	(1)
Recycling	68	(3)
Skirts	71	(1)
My Mother's Closet	72	(3)
Sisters	75	(3)
The Light Bulb	78	(2)
Fathers and Daughters, Mothers and Sons	80	(5)
Rough Winds Do Shake	85	(1)
My Father's O.S.S. File	86	(1)
Eye Level	87	(1)
Last Afternoon in Athens	88	(1)
Love and War	89	(3)
Bedtime Stories	92	(3)
The End of Summer	95	(2)
The Crust House	97	(2)
The Web	99	(1)
The Seamy Side	100

Excerpts

Chapter One

      Thick and Thin

Time thickens.

Sticky, taffy-brown,

the malleable gunk of family

memories, resemblances, resentments,

anecdotes thumped and punched

by a succession of urgent hands

hardens and cools, but early lumps remain,

fingerprints, palmprints, even marks of teeth.

You spend a lifetime trying to smooth these out.

Time thins.

To the original mix nothing is added

but a steady trickle wrung from years,

a faintly salty broth, not tears, not sweat.

The solution weakens until only

a feeble fingerprint of this first scent

trembles half-imagined on the air.

That earliest essence--what was it again?

You spend a lifetime trying to get it back.

Samian Morning, 1971

The gypsy loomed in the open door of morning,

bulky, unsmiling, her head wrapped in a scarf.

Her hand was out. She wanted something from me.

I don't remember whether I faced her fully.

Had I looked her straight in the eye and then beyond her,

I would have seen the Aegean like a frame.

If I had looked far enough over her right shoulder,

I would have seen Patmos lifting in a strip of light

from the horizon's lip. Over her left

shoulder I could have craned and seen Ionia.

But both these radiant regions were blocked off

not only by the figure in the doorway.

Where had she come from? Behind the house was a field.

Beyond this square green field--it was a wheatfield-

were a bent fig tree and a low stone wall

and a whitewashed hut like a gatehouse. Behind the wall

a road wound north away from the coast to the village.

She could have just walked up Poseidon Street

to ours, the last house in the row. But I think

she came around from the side, the back, the North.

I used to think the wind blew straight from Russia.

Turkey was left, the East,

and right and West was the great granite mountain.

My stinginess and resentment balanced by shame,

I gave the gypsy something I remember

probably only because she scowled and reproached me.

Whether she came back a second time

to try again, another woman with her,

is wavering conjecture. But I see all right

the thing I gave her: bright yellow, cashmere,

still with its Saks Fifth Avenue label,

a sweater someone had given me, no doubt,

for the same reason I tried to palm it off

on the gypsy, who rejected it with scorn.

The sweater was marred. A stain like a port wine birthmark

splotched the front. Who would wear such a thing?

Not I. Not she. I recall the botched transaction

but have to supply the shining of the sea,

brilliant backdrop to the piebald life

I must have turned back to after the gypsy, grumbling,

took herself away from the open door,

though I do not know if I turned to it with relief.

      Ghost Jam

Even if August spread out endlessly,

not all the blackberries

would ripen in one day. But equally,

to pick them piecemeal, one by one by one,

as each in turn

goes glitteringly black upon its own

inscrutable timetable can't be done.

I would be trapped in thorn and tapestry,

the leaves and mosses tarnishing each day;

step by step, finger by reaching finger

at first upon the border,

then deeper in the cool gulf of September,

each noontime clarity

more salient with its narrow blade of gold,

first only early mornings, then late mornings cold

and misty, so the ripest berries might

shine against wisps of white,

like black beacons, if black can give light.

And having filled

hours and containers with the cool

piles of glowing fruit,

I'd take it home and mash,

boil, stir, sweeten, strain

the hot dark stuff, its stinging purple stain

with sterilized jars (ready

to be filled with jam

then topped with paraffin),

their mouths agape

to take and taste and store and save the time,

the August, then September day, the hill

sealed in hot glassware set to slowly cool.

Would. Not will .

The blackberries this summer are behind

what I remember from a year ago.

Now when I venture to the prickly hill

I cannot lose myself or fill my pail.

For each long berry gleaming ebony

there are a dozen green or greenish red

or reddish black, all clinging tightly still.

And if the picker tugs impatiently,

the seeds feel woody, sour, dry,

no crushing in the mouth,

purpling of fingers, black perfume of fall.

But even if they ripened all at once

and early, and I had

a hundred hands and hours to spare, I know

that I would hear a low

call from behind the hill:

not loud but palpable, not shrill

but irresistible,

without whose urgent summons no

berries could muster this seductive glow;

without whose pull, strong and invisible,

from somewhere behind

the cold and golden, wet and tangled hill

I'd never lose myself in search of fruit.

Without the waiting world--

I do not see it yet, do not evoke,

only acknowledge it-

how could the berries keep

the mystery of their promise, sweet and black?

Once again this year I won't find out.

I hear the call

and I am going back.

      Déjà Vu

A flap in time, a hinge in space, a secret drawer, a panel,

an unexpectedly discovered island in the river,

an instant confidence that is immediately forgotten

until, unless some utter stranger comes upon it later,

years later, less by rumor, instinct, chance, blind luck, or vision,

than memory. These discoveries are the future recollected,

a bump of time scooped from hereafter and transferred to now,

stolid durations understudy, flashback of the future.

No wonder children (have I read this, heard, remembered,

    dreamed it?)

experience these interludes, these hidden flaps more strongly,

more urgently, as more uncanny, ghostly, and amazing

than those of us bowed down so blindly by the weight of days,

beyond astonishment, made numb by dint of repetition.

Children, with more they must experience, less they can

    remember,

itch to accumulate, take hold of even what is not

exactly now, precisely then, but somehow in between--

ghostly, prophetic, a quotidian-gilding vision

wrung from the flux, the might have been, the maybe, the

    abandoned,

the oh I wish I hope I dream , arcs of transcendent longing,

familiarity with lives unlived and yet available,

the haze not yet completely clear, all structures wreathed in mist

less blinding than what daily life is dully swaddled in,

each castle, tower, and labyrinth particular and gleaming,

each episode, each conversation burnished, fiercely clear.

Copyright © 2001 Rachel Hadas. All rights reserved.