Read an Excerpt
Pass It On
By Rachel Hadas PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1989 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06761-2
CHAPTER 1
The Fields of Sleep (Summer)
i
On a bare beach a woman and a man
ask an enormous question finally
answered and embodied in the blond
shape of a baby who is now refusing
to take an apple from her outstretched hand.
Still life: peeled pear; cheese; apple; napkin tied
bandit fashion round a little neck?
In life it's never still. You must
choose between color and order,
blood in the cheeks, the kerchiefs red-white check.
Or else in white and blue
he and she sit still at the edge of a river.
Her head against his shoulder,
they picture striped umbrellas, awnings fluttering
in some country where there's still a sky.
ii
You splash in a shallow
navel of idle
pulses whose tug,
deceptively gentle,
laps at the central
cherished hollow
print of an absence,
mold you were pressed in,
and sculpts those features—
familiar, forgotten—
you recognize under
the striped umbrella,
propping the baby
against the wall
black in the sun
of the salty hole,
gulf of years
nibbled, eroded
by an invisible
undertow.
iii
What light we saw, kindled, reflected—quenched.
Our mirrors' mutual sparkling put to bed,
dully we face each other,
too tired to use the silence.
I have lost you
no more than myself.
What dove to the bottom will
resurface in brief calm,
a silver tail
gleam in sullen air.
iv
Last night we watched
a twinkling star
or flying saucer
or beacon of war
flash red, then blue,
or red, then green—
invisible through
a binocular
or under cupped hand.
Then went to bed.
Mysterious beacon.
Mysterious man,
so near and far.
Bank of warm bone.
Socked-in aircraft
or nameless star.
v
The proffered bowl of milk. A child's grave face,
attentive, listening.
A woman glimpsed through trees. How silently
she parts the branches, saving words as too
precious for any ordinary use
before the black gates close.
vi
How can I put you down?
Nightly you must negotiate alone
fluorescent escalators, straddle
banisters gleaming neon
and noiselessly slide down.
How can I tell you "sleep"?
Nightly the body yearns to re-create
its lost polarity,
shape of love unsculpted,
lost or forgotten mate.
How can I let you cry?
Nightly you must move on
toward that point where all roads come
together into one
lost just as it touches the horizon.
How can I shut the door?
Nightly you must go through
so many dark arcades
and come back whole
clutching morning's clue.
vii
Clasping her burbling radio
the old woman sleeps.
Is she a widow after twenty years?
Does anyone now love her?
The youngest one, half boy half baby, sleeps.
The man and woman
sleep back to back. Sheet lightning
flaps against the sky's dark argument.
Black scooped from silence, too
flat for reflections, summer
runs along under the bridge of night.
Mornings they rise to their names.
Having travelled the enormous distance,
they need to re-create it
not once but daily. Not
daily but nightly to go down alone.
viii
Night is stumbling over fields of thunder.
Fulgurations
soldered together might illuminate
summer as one
sunken continent of broken sleep—
now scattered islands
dipping from fitful fire.
ix
Sunday morning. Smell of something dead
rises through boards of the porch
floor where mother and son
sit dragging loaded brushes over newsprint.
Patches of red and orange wait for meaning
to dry. What lies below
rots at a sultry pace;
what lives takes shape and nods,
sleepy with summer, stubbornly still growing.
Her finger pricked, the Sleeping Beauty fell
asleep for a hundred summers
as a result of which (the child
dabbing the spindle red
adds) she felt much better.
x
Where system met
system, the old ones spoke
wordlessly, code
embedded as in rock.
Ceremony half
true, the old game
annually renewed:
song without name,
> rippleable small pool,
infinitely deep
swallower of all
outrageous rigmarole
studies moth and stone,
water, flower, wood
fragrant after rain.
New, the late world.
xi
Maps and weather draw that slate-blue gaze
tracing and poring labyrinthine ways
of high cloud structures, silent omens of
remote mutations at an earthly pace.
That minatory tower of steely gray,
fog that a sullen sunrise burns away,
a rainbowed stormlet spattering at noon—
all taken from the palette of one day.
Cloud-maps combine fortuity with fate.
Lines plotted out, we scan them, stand, and wait.
Tock goes the metronome. A yawn. A sneeze.
Sun bursts through and it thunders, soon or late.
You've worked out devious ways to reach this house
cocooned in its deceptive August drowse.
The sky is azure, navy, apple green.
Infinite suspension carries us.
xii
Glory and dullness crowd the eye and ear
down to a stream of names,
desires, the bite-sized hills
closing in prematurely
like a stage setting (who turned down the lights?).
Joy and numbness split the repetition
in two; an apple
squarely slaps the pole
and shatters and the bits
roll into deep wet grass, bare hills of dream.
xiii
To gaze at the hypnotic
yellow moon of summer,
to focus on a stone,
on lives that wax and wane,
on leaves that come undone
in drought or shine with rain,
the child's fresh face, a magnet to the eye—
is this idolatry?
Between the glistening pelts of bathing children
and the knuckle-gnawing refusal
to look up from one's book,
find out some middle way.
Fences. A weathered barn.
Are you getting warmer?
The milky gray expanse of sky implodes
on one more apparition:
no silo shimmering through celestial mist,
only more love for this
world's pillars, banisters,
exit signs, arches, thresholds, winding stairs
struggled up toward a revelation hidden
even as we breathe the thinner
air and feel the sun's
last heat on our closed faces.
Earth and Air (Fall)
i
To love a son
and the moon out of darkness.
No way but words, the blind
clutch in trust, the plane
tilts over gleaming fields,
shrugs higher, and another planet rises—
no, the moon
over the mountain's shoulder, going home,
ripe orange, soon to set
above the world my own, my delicate
network of joy and fear, the week's arc done.
ii
Day by day another summer gone.
Calmly the lamp shines in a veil of rain.
Music booming in the dusty barn
as through a hole in the wall the claim
of morning keeps on shining. Leaves
turn. It doesn't rain. I turn to see
him lie a little while on the wolfskin
resting from play as sun
sneaks in the window. Boards
are gray with weather. Spiderwebs, dead flies
and wasps, and through the window
that withering and brilliance of leaves
whose workaday theatrics deck a world
yellow and black and pale and hectic red
where things go gray and spectre-thin and die.
iii
Sunsets over Lake Champlain, a mini
Mare Nostrum. Though they call the event
of a water landing (surely an oxymoron)
"extremely unlikely," nevertheless it's water
this dying light luxuriantly slides over
as the plane tilts. Two
seats ahead a pair of lovers kiss
then pull apart to gaze at one another
turning their heads unnaturally far
so each can wholly scan the other's face,
devour it all, eyes, hair, bone, breath,
penetrate the frustrate, the opaque
envelope of flesh
which will become, to one in the back seat,
a ghostly comfort—alone, not alone,
holding a hand, touching a knee, but reaching
the world at a deliberate remove
from that fresh famished love,
sensing otherness
over a bridge of bone.
iv
My little Ithaca. A gilded world,
tiny. The simple opening to receive
and closing, undramatic,
dimple in dough, ripple on brown water,
now seen, now not,
most valued at a distance.
Zone of suspension here.
Gold hole between the worlds.
Through a gap in the wall
a window in the barn
the long dull morning gliding on and on.
v
To fix the wind
or the late clouds' slate
or your sweet weight
nights on my knees;
hillside of trees
eternally plural;
autumns and suns;
memories; moons;
this orange leaf,
this brown, another.
Fullness, remember.
Fix each grief
over and over
in the heart's eye,
the eye's deep core,
scarlet of autumn
when blood and green
yearly sluice out.
I cannot do it—
cannot keep color
from sliding out
between my fingers
and clench a fist
on emptiness.
Step out to pee
in crisp grass
and there is the sound
of winter, wind
starting to sough
through almost bare
branches, stripping
naked for winter.
Fix It (Winter)
He disappeared in the dead of winter.
—W. H. Auden
lips part
To greet the perfect stranger.
—James Merrill
i
Heart's February: fill it in as bleak
and lonely. But today a warming flood
of color stains the calendar's pale cheek.
The eve of your return I give my blood.
Picture a glacier bruising into bloom.
I let it all hang out and drain from my
right, my writing arm: the silent room,
morning and evening's empty bed. I lie
between two bodies, palping a red ball,
flushed to pallor, gazing at the ceiling,
as hollow days are dammed into a crimson pool
soon to be sealed and channeled to a stranger
and even more precarious life. Pm filling
a loving cup to raise to mortal danger.
ii
What the eye, seeking, fails to penetrate
the ear awaits. Presentiy a cry
(baby waking, tomcat, beaten dog,
or floating rage caught raw between the walls)
shrills from the street. No, from the locked
interior whose study window, bright
with strained attention, now winks suddenly
from a blank surface. You've turned on the light.
Beyond the potted palms in some remote
anteroom the beaded curtains stir:
so I must sense, must pluck from winter air
the snatches of that song, or let the link
between our skulls (now stretched; now tighter) loosen.
I shut my eyes and almost hear you think.
iii
I read much of the night. Ineptly woo
some shabby cousin of oblivion
out of the garish hours after two.
Having locked the secret inmost door,
stretched, and remembered once again you're gone,
I wander to the kitchen for a swig
of milk, and creak back down the corridor
to a ghost bedroom, chilly and too big.
No, but the necklace! Burst
and scattered agates sprayed apart and rolled
under the furniture, and it was lost,
the labyrinth of winter, overnight
and not to be recovered. Somehow sealed
in those cold globes was a whole summer's wealth of light
iv
I lean my ladder on
the beautiful, the flawed
handiwork of God
and turn to spy my son
busy way down there
patching a balloon,
filling in the moon.
The whole world needs repair.
Broken! he calls the moon
if it is less than round.
These syllables resound
16 domestically soon
as lightbulb, pencil, tile
get broken. His decree
Fix it! shows faith in me
that prompts me first to smile
and then suppress a sigh
and fetching tape and glue
climb up to mend the blue
disasters in the sky.
I lean my ladder on
the beautiful, the flawed
handiwork of God
and turn to spy my son.
v
Time to tunnel deeper into winter.
Broken! the boy cries, pointing at the moon.
Agates roll downhill into the river.
I stretch my chilly legs awake and wonder
whether this absence will seem warmer soon
and, sighing, rise: another day of winter.
It's not as if I'm lonely. I'm a mother.
busy with fixing - pop went that balloon.
Agates roll away into a river
opaque with ice. So walk across the water,
so fix the brownouts of a cloudy sun?
No use. We're heading deeper into winter.
What has been lost is gone and gone forever:
such knowledge is what forty winters mean.
My agates (yours?)—they vanished in the river
like last year's snows. The only ever after
is what's already written in the rune
of losses deeply etched into the winter
while agates settle blackly at the bottom of the river.
vi
Something terrible is going to happen.
Something terrible has already happened.
Up from the dark words of authority rise,
anger, affection. Lights
gleam a minute till the door is slammed.
Easier to instruct anyone else in the truth of feeling
than try to span the awful gap yourself,
yourself to search for stones to leapfrog on
across the—is it water or a tunnel?
And in. And shut that door.
I don't hear or listen well these days.
Did you say your new poem about your father
was to be called "Lines Found in a Bottle"?
I think I got it wrong. This bottle had
milk in it, bourbon, apple juice—not words.
It plugged three generations' mouths to dumbness.
Weaned to a cup, my son escaped the bottle
and now eats sugar by the spoonful. I chew gum.
Faces stuffed, we slam right out of this
impossible world, propelled at speed
by terror, rage, loss,
and enter the shadow room of mourning.
Now it is multiplied as in a hall of mirrors.
Unpeeled of memory, ranks of men leap up
leaving lighted rooms with a start to go
in search of those lost lives:
precious particulars of how and when,
not whether, something terrible has happened.
"Both my fathers have cancer," you said once.
I think you said it. Asymmetrically
you had two fathers, I had none. I had to
run upstairs one summer, slam a door,
and cry about my father: not that the loss was fresh
but that downstairs a woman also wept
whose ripened loss matched mine.
Two wounds touching start to bleed again.
Wetness is blessed: fountain stubbornly tumbling
to rise again over dust, shit, shards of glass.
"Now I want to kneel at a stream and drink,
or drink from a cup"; words flow from you
the week I'm teaching water, dipping deep
in Walden Pond, cursing aridities.
It had been said before as praise: "Recovered
greenness"; as prayer: "Send my roots rain."
Subterranean fathers hollowly
boom at the bottom of their empty cistern
Drink me. My son's new interest in drains
and water fountains (mountains, as he calls them):
he squats or lies face down to peer below
the grating; stretches up to touch the water.
Mountain of water, shine another spring
so we can drink from you or wet our lips
or raise a chancy cup
and across the rim salute each other's
continued greenness. But the wind blows fresh
and filthy from the river.
Fix what is broken. What is scattered gather.
Easy to say. Not far from here, a woman
looks up to meet her eyes in the mirror
and sees a death. Her own?
Something terrible is about to happen?
Something terrible has already happened.
Not in the dead of winter
her father went, but one day before Easter
he walked the green, the warming earth, then vanished.
Pieces of his shirt still lay on the rug that night
where they'd cut it off to try to start his heart.
The tick, the march, inexorable. She touches
her own heart. It's beating.
Wait. There are children sleeping.
There is unfinished music on the table.
The rest of a life waits on the other side of the mirror
and also somewhere invisible a limit.
A wall. If it were only painted black,
if she could see dark glass, it would be clearer.
She would be able to turn away from light
awhile and walk to the room of the dead and say
it again: Something terrible has happened.
Fix what is broken. What is scattered gather.
Love's gift of agates sown on the barren winter:
find them, restring them in another order.
And news of the lost father—
bottle bobbing, contents still unread,
toward a nameless destination,
perhaps a country where there are no fathers,
far out across the black and oily water.
Swoop of a bird swung between high walls.
Cry of a child rising from the house of darkness.
vii
Up, uppie, says the boy, and holds his arms
up to be lifted in a world where sink
and table, chair and crib are still so tall
they have to be looked up to. Uppie, up!
The small bones lengthen, stretching in his sleep.
He is growing up. Our idiom features
cosily preposition-ended phrases
as well for aging, as slow down, dry out,
finally shrivel up.
Withered, a bush blows hard in autumn wind,
bald of petals now but still upright,
up, up,
obeying the commands of appetite.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Pass It On by Rachel Hadas. Copyright © 1989 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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