Rachel Hadas: February 29, 2020
As if we knew but didn’t know we knew. February 29: Leap Day, An extra day, an ordinary day, predictable even in being extraordinary – a bonus day in the old dispensation we couldn’t guess was close to termination. When did we start to sense the great subtraction? Leap Day, then. And I was on my way to catch a train to go to Tarrytown (people still had a schedule and a plan, mapping the hours to their destination) to run a four-hour class on poetry – specifically, tailored to the day, on poems that performed a lyric leap: the way the mind hopscotches, A to C or D or Z, a little lateral hop or skip, a sudden swerve, a syncopation. I waited for the train. Grand Central Station: tourists and travelers in circulation, all of them aimed at some desired location, throngs chatting, texting, pausing to gaze up at the iconic ceiling’s constellations. A pregnant woman in a scarlet coat posed for a photo with a selfie stick. Her baby must be six months old by now. Waiting for my train, could I foresee crowds would soon be prohibited by law? Could anyone imagine the great hall would within weeks be scoured clean of all humanity? Just dust motes in the sun. Idle tracks. An empty waiting room. Whoever sensed it didn’t want to see. That extra day, that ordinary day, I got where I was going on the train and taught the lyric leap, as per the plan; then, tired, happy, bathed in poetry, caught a train and travelled back again, retraced my steps. Grand Central one more time. Maybe make that Grand Central one last time. Looking back now, I can see I saw, that Leap Day when we leaped with poetry, the cold blue morning light, the dappled sky, the river silver grey as we rode by. But what no one was prepared to see: not quite a harbinger, since it was there already. No, a searchlight raked the air invisibly, masked by the morning’s glare. That searchlight still is circling everywhere, And everyone’s a target – you and me. And yet with the bewilderment and fear, upheaval on a scale we scarcely see even though we sense it in the air, something else persists invisibly, companion to our stunned anxiety – something that isn’t going anywhere. Poetry is still here.
Rachel Hadas’s many books include Poems for Camilla (Measure Press, 2018).
Copyright 2020 Rachel Hadas
So happy to see this poem today (yes, feeling that “stunned anxiety” in the moment). Your poem has reached out to me–as you did so many times back in my student days. Thank you for teaching me about the ways that poetry can hold a hand!
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