Three Poems
by Rachel Hadas
Put Me Down
by Rachel Hadas
“Lydia, Lydia, put me down!”
I can hear and almost see
my friend’s father say—
not in anger, not in agitation,
but in a slightly strangled voice
as Lydia (thirteen or fourteen; strapping)
spread her arms and clasped her father
(balding, bespectacled, seersucker jacket)
and lifted him and held him
an inch or two off the ground
not for very long, but long enough
for me to hold that ambered moment still,
even though I have to reimagine
whoever else might have been standing there
(what were the expressions on their faces?)
and trees, a porch, a lawn
and the July or August afternoon
that Lydia lifted up and held suspended
together with her father there in time.
The No Longer and the Not Yet
May, and the leaves are green again.
Between the river and the street,
the no longer and the not yet
bask on benches in the sun
or, in the playground, swing and climb
as if they were exempt from time.
Leaving the park, the pastoral,
I cross to Riverside Drive, where tall
buildings seem to have stood forever
whose western windows face the river,
affording tenants front-row seats
to a spectrum of sunsets:
winter’s red glow behind the trees,
spring’s soft pastel subtleties.
From Riverside, I climb the hill
past Claremont and the nursery school
to Broadway. The college gates are shut.
No one can get in or out.
Here, even though I crane to see,
I’m mostly glimpsing memory.
And as I take my mental tour,
decades vanish in thin air.
That owl in Alma Mater’s gown—
I loved to spy it. So did my son.
Flagpole, fountains, the sundial,
the Thinker in front of Philosophy Hall
(my father’s office was in there,
Classics Department, seventh floor),
and the statue of Hamilton.
On a balmy afternoon,
faces tilted to catch the sun,
students would loll on Low Library’s stair.
The campus was a theater.
That production, though, is over.
Pondering this transformation,
I skip back to my generation.
More vivid for being black and white,
here is a photo from Sixty-eight.
Facing the camera with a leer,
in shades, and chomping on a cigar,
a young man sits in the President’s chair,
feet on the desk, defying age
and decorum, his center stage
that office in Low Library.
A pose? Performativity,
as people now so often say?
I saw the photo yesterday
in that same man’s obituary:
David Shapiro, poet who
left Kirk’s office long ago—
that stage, that theater. Now instead
he swells the chorus of the dead
who studied here. What would they say
if they were standing here today?
I’m listening, drifting down the street
between the no longer and the not yet.
Back
My mother’s soft power was persuasion.
I dreaded any challenge, any change
when I was young, and had to be cajoled
into what usually turned out okay—
going to someone’s birthday party, say.
Only now (I’m old
and yesterday was Mother’s Day)
do I grasp her endurance and her patience.
Theme and variations:
they come back, those repeated conversations.
It would be afternoon when she and I
perched on my parents’ bed in the back bedroom.
Looking out the window, one could see
the Trillings’ window right across the alley.
They saw our window; we
could glimpse the cat peering out our window.
Both ground-floor apartments,
one on Riverside Drive,
one on Claremont Avenue,
had two vistas, front view and back view.
I was seven or eight. I don’t remember
Everything I and my mother said.
Whatever I said she already knew.
Replaying our intimate debate,
I listened patiently and she replied.
Gradually, surely to her relief,
along with my anxiety
these conversations faded—
absorbed, digested less in memory
than someplace more obscure, some deeper layer,
subliminal, secure. And mow I see
the power of her patience has to be
relocated. Now it’s up to me
to persuade myself there’s nothing to fear.
It is my turn now to enact my mother,
access her power and patience,
and summon up those distant conversations
in a back bedroom on Riverside Drive,
back when I was her daughter,
back when she was alive.