"Breath on the Pane" and "Drawing Lessons": Poems by Rachel Hadas

"dive into the image that we choose, / or that chose us"

BREATH ON THE PANE

Two poems crossed my screen the other day –
poems by students, I was going to say,
but they were both my age. All three of us
were drawn to themes of memory and loss.

So it was not coincidentally
that their poems shared both imagery
and a perspective, taking the long view
of episodes, detached but poignant too,
 
recollected in tranquility,
as Wordsworth put it. More specifically,
both poets seemed to peer as through a pane
of glass. Though feelings cool, details remain.
 
One describes how he stood looking out
from a high window at a parking lot,
empty, at night. The other can recall
a certain beer (years since he drank at all),
 
and sees with startling clarity the brown
glass of that bottle. Broken, the shards shine.
Transparent and impersonal and cold,
the trope of glass conveys what can’t be told,
 
but lets us intimate the larger scene.
New York: a wife walked out. Vermont: the sun
rose on a snowy day. Regret and waste;
the brand of beer he still can all but taste –
 
memories evoking desolation
softened by years. Is time a consolation?
The answer, we three seventy-somethings know,
has to be Janus-faced: both yes and no.
 
Standing back and shaping into verse
what once felt raw and merciless, or worse,
we breathe warm steam on the cold glass of grief
and writing in that mist is our relief,
 
even if the sharp edge of what we then
felt is renewed enough to cut again.
We’ve achieved distance, not immunity
From what the poems make us feel again, and see.

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DRAWING LESSONS

Images, words: the mind’s incessant flow,
still moving, now more hesitant and slow,
river into delta, a broad plain
where everything is spread out to be seen.
But we can only see things one by one.
 
Always distraction is the difficulty.
But since it’s where we live, then try to face
The ambient chaos, welcome its embrace,
Then dive into the image that we choose,
or that chose us. We have nothing to lose.
 
One sight that sticks with me is the tail
of a blue phoenix soaring on a tile
from fifteenth-century Turkey. I couldn’t draw it
worth a damn,  but gazed until I knew it.
I used the pencil in my hand to see.

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Rachel Hadas is a poet, essayist, and translator. Her book of short prose pieces, PASTORALS, is forthcoming from Measurer Press; other recent books include GHOST GUEST and PANDEMIC ALMANAC (poetry), and PIECE BY PIECE (selected prose). She’s among the forty-some translators of Nonnus’s rollicking epic from late antiquity, TALES OF DIONYSUS, and has also translated the Iphigenia plays of Euripides. Recently retired from Rutgers University-Newark, where she taught for many years, she divides her time between New York City and Danville, Vermont, and is Original English Verse editor of CLASSICAL OUTLOOK and poetry editor of the ROBERT GRAVES REVIEW.

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